


AKA Cloak and Dagger

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Women, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Everyone Is Wearing Their Sassypants, Explicit Language, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Foggy Nelson Is Really Fucking Done Right Now, Human Experimentation, Jessica Is The Most Graceful Fucking Vigilante And She Will Fight You, M/M, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Origin Story, Post-Season/Series 01 Finale, Season/Series 01 Spoilers, Spoilers for Jessica Jones, The Fic Everyone Knew Was Coming, Unreliable Narrator, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-03 05:09:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 49,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5277866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have a new case. It doesn't quite turn out the way anyone expects it to.</p><p>[Or, the one where Jess is adopted by some psycho lawyers and their pets, and just wants to go the fuck home.] </p><p>[<em>The Price of War</em> 'verse, post-<em>Jessica Jones,</em> spoilers for the whole of <em>Jessica Jones</em> inside. Jessica POV. Some JessTrish, but Jess is a stubborn shit, so fair warning.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extasiswings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/gifts).



> Trigger warnings for: body horror (needle squicks ahoy, ESPECIALLY when it comes to eyeballs), alcoholism, mentions of heavy drinking, forced drug use, human experimentation through drug trials, kidnap, assault, blood, guns and gunshots, physical violence, symptoms and depiction of drug overdose (vomiting, coma, seizure/seizure aftermaths), minor references to discrimination/jury bias against POC, and some Batman level parkour.
> 
> Part one of three, because I like to make myself suffer. 
> 
> I was going to make this one chapter, but I decided to give Tandy and Ty the origin story they deserve. Which means three parts to this little thing. Plus, I enjoy writing Jessica way too much to stop. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed, as per usual.

Jessica Jones isn’t stupid. A lot of people seem to think she is, for some godforsaken reason. Sure, she’s a bruiser, not a strategist, and sure, she gets into a hell of a lot of fights—or a hell of a lot of fights get into her, and she ends them, as fast as possible—but just because she doesn’t think three or twelve or a hundred moves ahead just like some kind of goddamn Tony Stark doesn’t mean she’s a fucking idiot.

So when she starts hearing stories from around the Kitchen about some asshole dressing up in a black mask and beating the shit out of people? She stays as far away from it as possible. She’s done with the whole vigilante sector, done with heroism and all its ensuing drama. She’s been done with it for ages. Finding stolen cats and taking creeper cam shots of cheating husbands is more her speed now, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

(— _Birch Street, Higgins Drive_ —)

Things kind of go to shit when it comes the resident psycho of Hell’s Kitchen, though, despite the fact that she keeps her nose well out of it. There are a lot of different stories going around. Fisk’s innocent, Fisk owns the 15th. The masked man—the devil, people keep calling him, the devil of Hell’s Kitchen—he blew up half the neighborhood, or he was framed. The Russians are running it all. The Chinese are running it all. The Japanese—well, nobody really knows what’s going on with the Japanese other than _stay the fuck away_. Anyone who asks around gets killed. All _anybody_ knows (and that includes her) is that something is going on. But she might know a bit more than she lets on, because Jess, she talks to the homeless a lot in her line of work. Comings and goings, odd happenings, they’re her bread, and the people of the streets know that shit better than anybody ever thinks. So she talks to them, knows each of them by name and reputation and corner. There’s a boy who lives under the abandoned car in the lot near her office who always has his ears to the ground, and he tells her (“Straight from the source, you understand,” Reynardine says, spitting onto the sidewalk, “you couldn’t pay for shit this good anywhere, Jones”) that the devil is working on something big. He says that Fisk doesn’t just own the cops, he owns the whole fucking city, or so it seems. He says that the devil’s found a way to bring the bastard down, and that—and this is something that has her getting drunk late at night because Jesus Christ, not again—the devil of Hell’s Kitchen has some kind of Girl Friday, one who looks like the Black Widow. “Everyone who’s gone against Fisk?” Reynardine makes a _squick_ noise, slashes a hand across his throat. “Dead, _except_ those two. They have to be doing something right.”

Sure, they have to be doing something right, Jess thinks, when she settles herself in the fire escape across from Luke’s, and starts to fiddle with her camera. Even if they’re both fucking nuts to willingly sign up for this job, whoever they are, they have to be doing something right.

(— _favor, would you please, Jessica, and get that bastard to shut the hell up?_ )

Even after Fisk falls, though, they stick around. The devil. The Girl Friday. She’d thought they would vanish into the dark, but no—Fisk falls, and in the next day, it seems like, the internet comes up with cutesy names for them. The dumbasses in the BDSM suits decide to make the Kitchen, of all places, their hunting ground. She kind of hates them a little for that. The Kitchen isn’t big names and dark magic and Captain America with his shining beacon of patriotism and rage issues. The Kitchen is the dirt and the mud, blood under your fingernails, human beings fucking over other human beings purely for the sake of greed, hate, jealousy. The Kitchen is gang wars and dirty cops and turf disputes, drugs and whores and switchblades in your back. The Kitchen isn’t supposed to have heroes, but Daredevil (and Lilith, she can’t forget Lilith because sometimes she looks at the name and all she can hear is _do me a favor, Jess, my beautiful girl_ ) seems to have buried himself in it. Which is even _more_ reason to stay away from the bastard.

Still, even a shit PI has to catch a break sometimes. After everything with Kilgrave, after every single damn one of her nightmares trot out onto the street to take a shit in front of her, after everything, Reynardine turns up on her doorstep with a bribe (whiskey, nice stuff, probably stolen out of someone’s car; she doesn’t really give a shit) and a case. Runaways, he says. Dead runaways on street corners with needles in their eyes. And Jess looks into it, flipping a bird to of all her instincts and all her good sense and her better fucking judgment, because in spite of everything, she’s not about to ignore kids dying. _Because_ of everything, she won’t ignore kids dying. Not ever. And certainly not like that.

She’d take the case even without his bribe, but she accepts the whiskey anyway, because her ribs are still sore as all fucking hell.

(“You know these kids?” she asks Malcolm on the third day with no sleep, because she’s apparently lost control of her brain and her mouth and her soul to this shit. “You ever meet any of them?”

Malcolm looks down at the spread of photos across her desk. The corners of his mouth shift, tighten. He touches the edges of a photograph, a boy with long dreads and a hoop in his nose. Then he draws back. “I only bought from Kilgrave,” he says. “But yeah. I met one or two.”

She’s smart enough to shut up after that, at least.) 

So Jess looks into it, because of all of that and because she knew some of those kids, too. Wylder and Lillie and the Matchstick, she knew those kids, and she finds—well. She finds pretty much everything she expects to find. There’s a drug runner (maybe with ties to Fisk even though the bastard's locked away, maybe to the Maggia, maybe to both) who’s been luring kids off the street, stealing them, and giving them bigger highs, longer trips, blasting them with MGH when they don’t have any way to stop it. But it’s a new kind of MGH, a new style of mutant growth hormone, and it leaves those kids screaming and seizing and tearing themselves apart. The children with the needles in their eyes, they’re the ones who said no, who tried to fight, who didn’t want the syringe and the blood. The bodies the cops dismiss out of hand? They’re the children who were dumped after failing whatever fucked up test they’re supposed to have passed.

And one night (because she starts wandering around at night again, in the alleys and the underpasses, looking for somewhere to dump a body) she finds another one, a girl, fourteen, maybe. Her body’s still warm, the blood’s still wet on her face, the puke on her tattered skirt, and Jessica? She’s pissed. She’s _furious_. So she walks alone at three in the morning down by the waterfront, where she knows these bastards are hiding. She grabs one of her tails (she picks them up near the first stack of shipping containers, and they’re shit, really, they have no idea how to trail someone without being seen) and breaks him, nose-wrist-leg-hip, before saying to the other, “Get your fucking boss out here before I come in after him.”

She’s only four words into it when they jump her. It’s kind of exactly what she wanted.

Jess has never had a style beyond _hit them until they stop moving,_ and it works the same way it always does, the snap and pop of bone, the way blood smears over her splitting knuckles, how she can break them apart without ever leaving the ground. There are loads of them, though, and when she finishes the first wave, there’s a second. A second wave, and then a third, and when she staggers (someone catches her in the face with a baseball bat) she can still hear more people coming. They’re getting younger, their eyes wilder. Kids, druggies, blasted and high and ruined and scared. She’s just turning to face the next crew when the guy with the gun ( _sloppy, Jessie, sloppy, sloppy, sloppy_ ) opens fire.

She’s been shot at, before. Hell, she’s been _shot_ before. Usually she’s smart enough to get the fuck out of the way of the people with guns. Just like last time, though, it clips her in the shoulder, a graze, but it snaps her body sideways and puts a hole in her jacket. It only takes a second for them to be on her. Someone’s shoe catches her hard in the jaw. She’s expecting a pile, then, expecting to have to kick and scream and glide her way out. But there’s no one there, and when her ears stop ringing, she can hear someone scream.

Jessica forces her eyes open, and there—

Black—

Another gunshot, echoing, rebounding—

The whirl of batons and the wet snap of a breaking bone—

“Get up!”

The gun skitters to her and she breaks it in half with both hands before someone else can seize it—

Someone is screaming, they won’t stop, they won’t _stop_ —

“Seriously, get up,” a woman says, and then she hears the crackle of electricity. Jessica pushes herself to her feet, fast as she can, more slowly than she’d like, and crosses an arm over her stomach to clutch at her bad shoulder. By the time she’s on her feet, the last round’s been called, and there’s someone else standing in the wreckage of humanity left behind.

 _The Kitchen,_ Jessica thinks. Lilith and the Kitchen. She’s shorter than Jess might have thought she would be. Her hair curls over her shoulders, and her mouth is painted red. Lilith shoves her taser back into the holster on her leg. “You might wanna get your nose looked at,” she says. “I think it’s broken.”

Metal clatters against pavement. There’s another strangled shout, and something whistles. Jessica ducks—it’s instinctive, she can’t help it, she hears the whirring and she drops—but Lilith doesn’t budge as the baton whirls past her face to clip one last man in the jaw. It comes so close that her hair moves in its passing, but she doesn’t shift a millimeter. The last guy hits the ground with a spattering, as if something’s been ripped apart, and the baton (dark, she thinks, though she can’t tell if it’s black or red) rolls away across the concrete.

“Thanks,” Lilith says to someone behind them both, and Jessica leaps out of the way, until she has both of them in her sights, both Lilith and the devil. Daredevil, she corrects herself. Daredevil, and it’s a fucking stupid name for this creature that’s slinking out of the dark, angles and weight and presence. She hadn’t realized he was there until he’d thrown the baton, and that scares her. Usually she can tell when a guy that’s built like this one is in her space. This one moves as if he’s always existed in this in-between, though, as if he’s a part of the night and the grit and the violence, nothing more remarkable than a broken bottle in an alleyway. He’s close to silent when he slips past her to collect his baton again.

“I could’ve handled it alone,” Jessica snaps, and spits out blood. Lilith cocks her head.

“From what I’ve heard? Of course. Just thought we’d lend a hand. Might not have been fair on those poor gentlemen otherwise.”

“You could just say thank you,” Daredevil adds, kicking one of the guards over onto his back to go through his pockets. His voice scrapes like sand. Lilith’s mouth quirks.

“Be nice.”

“What the fuck are you even doing here?” There’s blood on her chin from the blow to her face. Malcolm is going to fuss. _Fuck._ “This isn’t your turf.”

Daredevil doesn’t say anything. He just watches her for a moment, head tipped. Then he turns to Lilith. “Meet you inside,” he says, and then he sort of—he’s not a mutant, Jess doesn’t think, but he kind of fades into the shadows until she can’t make him out, anymore. Lilith steps over another unconscious guard to one of the kids, one of the last ones to fight, turning his head to check his pulse. She has to pull her glove off to do it, but she’s turned just enough that Jess can’t see her hand.

“Question is, what are you doing here?” She sounds like Jess’s grandmother, or what little Jess remembers of her grandmother. Georgia or Virginia or the Carolinas. Lilith pulls her glove back on, and stands. “Though clearly you’re fine on your own.”

“Stop fucking dancing around shit.” One of her teeth is loose in the back. Goddammit. Malcolm’s _really_ going to fuss, and then Trish is going to do that thing where she presses her lips together so tight that they turn white, and every single thing she’s done tonight is going to bite her _so hard_ in the ass. “You work in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“This is Hell’s Kitchen.”

“This is the waterfront.”

“Which is part of Hell’s Kitchen.” Lilith actually seems _amused_ , which, what the fucking hell kind of shit is this woman on, if she looks at this wreckage and she only feels amused? “You’re here.”

“No, you don’t—you don’t get to compare the pair of us. I’m just here for some of my kids. I don’t know what the hell you two are doing here.”

“You think that we’re going to ignore it when someone starts taking children off the street and experimenting on them?” Lilith says, curious. Her hands curl into fists. “Wow, I would hate to have your opinion of me. I’d probably never get out of bed in the morning.”

That’s not what she meant. But even she doesn’t really know what she meant by that one. Jessica opens her mouth, and shuts it again. “What the hell do you want from me?”

“Mostly I wanted you out of the way, before, but now I think—” Lilith tips her head like Daredevil. “You could help us, if you wanted.”

“I don’t need to help you with anything.”

“No, but you’re here looking for those kids same as us. We could get up in each other’s business, or we could make nice. Just for a night. Even if you hate me. Especially if this—” she scuffs her boot over one of Jess’s footprints, driven deep into the concrete “—is, you know, a regular thing for you.”

Jess swipes blood off her chin again. “And get my name in the paper with yours? No thanks. Not looking to be another hero.”

Lilith rests a hand on her taser, and considers her for a moment. It feels unsettlingly similar to how Trish will just shut up and look at you when you’ve done something or said something or fucking _thought_ something that doesn’t match up with her opinion of you, and it always makes Jessica feel hellishly small. Which usually means she snaps. This time she just prods at her broken nose (because it’s definitely broken, she can feel things shifting around when she touches it) and curses to herself. If there’s any reason to keep on avoiding the Devil and Lilith after this, she thinks, it’s that Lilith seems to know the playbook of _How To Make Jessica Jones Feel Like An Asshole_ (co-authored by Trish Walker and Malcolm Ducasse) by heart already. It’s really phenomenally irritating. “Suit yourself,” says Lilith. “Hero or not, you came after those kids same way we did, and we could use the backup. Someone like you could be useful.”

She’s not sure whether she should be offended that Lilith let go of the hero thing so quickly, or just relieved. She picks relieved, because her nose really fucking hurts. “Useful how?”

“You give a shit. That’s useful.” She clicks her tongue once or twice, thoughtful. “Your strength helps, too. And the kids know you, in there. I’ve heard about you, Jessica Jones. They trust you the way they won’t trust me or Daredevil, and you know it.”

The thing is, Jessica doesn’t. She’s really not sure these kids—whichever kids they have, whichever kids they’ve stolen—will know her name or her face. She’s not certain they’ll even want her to drag them out of this hellhole, but she came anyway. And so, apparently, did Lilith. (Daredevil too, probably, but Lilith’s the one standing here, challenging her. Daredevil’s already disappeared.)

“You want them out safely?” Lilith says. “Then help us tear this place apart.”

She holds out one gloved hand, then. Jess looks at it. Inside the warehouse, she can hear someone squeezing off a round, one, two. Lilith’s lips press tighter together, but other than that she doesn’t react. She stands, and waits, and Jessica looks at the blood on her hands for a moment. Then she takes it—not to shake, but to clasp, like she’s swearing a blood oath. She could tear this woman’s arm off, but Lilith doesn’t flinch. She squeezes Jessica’s hand once, hard, and then lets go.

“I’ll take it from the top and work down. Unless you’d rather?”

“I’ll take top.” Jess jerks her head. “What about him?”

“Daredevil? He’s fine.” But she’s worried anyway, Jess can see it in how she shifts from foot to foot, how she starts to turn to look over her shoulder and stops herself. From inside, there’s another choked-off shout. “I’ll flip you for the fire escape.”

“Keep the change,” Jessica says. “I’ll meet you in the middle in ten minutes. And if you get shot, I’m not cleaning up after your shit. Either of you,” she adds, because there’s another gunshot from inside the warehouse, and a wild, echoing scream, like someone’s seeing their worst nightmare. “Let him know.”

Lilith’s lip curls up again. “Aye aye, Captain Fly.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” Jessica says, and kicks off from the ground.

She overshoots by about twenty feet, which means when she lands, it’s hard. As in, she puts her right foot through a thin spot on this old, rickety rooftop hard. She wrenches her leg up out of the tiny hole she’s made (tiny, okay, only the circumference of her calf, not bad all things considered) and curses the new rip in her jeans before breaking the lock on the roof access door. Jessica gives it ten seconds before slipping inside, in case someone heard. The door screams like a fishwife as she yanks it shut behind her (which, thanks, fishwives everywhere, you’re all peaches). She counts off another ten seconds before Jess digs her cell phone out of her pocket to use as a flashlight.

Everything seems more muffled, coming from this way. The gunshots have gone quiet. So has the screaming, which is somehow more worrying. The staircase down from the roof are layered with dust; nobody’s been up these stairs for a while. She still listens hard at the base of them, just in case someone’s hanging around, before slipping out into the hallway. This part of the warehouse must have been offices, once upon a time. Most of the doors hang open. There’s a stained mattress in one room, a bundle of old cloth in the corner of another. Squatters. They’ve all been cleared out, by the look of things. She switches her phone from her right hand to her left, and shifts some broken glass around with her foot (it’s an old whiskey bottle, cheap shit; she’s pretty sure she has a bottle of it herself in her bedside table) before following the sound of carnage. She can hear footsteps, now, shouting. It still takes her by surprise when one of the doors snaps open, and a handful of guys step out, grumbling. She barely has enough time to shove her phone back into her pocket before one of them notices her. “What the _fuck_ ,” he says, but before he can really move all that much Jess has caught him with a running start, and thrown him through the wall. She doesn’t feel particularly bad about it, either, since a) he has a gun, b) he’s an adult, and c) he’s clearly not an addict, so that kind of narrows down the possibilities as to who he can be. When the other guys notice what’s happened (doesn’t take much, considering the dust and the fact that there’s bits of the roof coming down, now) they leap at her like horny bulldogs.

Jess has put another one through the wall (a different wall, this time, since she doesn’t exactly want to dig herself out of the roof if/when it comes down) and a third is in an unconscious sprawl on the floor when she hears the snuffling. Another stained mattress in another filthy room, but this one has an occupant. It’s a boy, maybe seventeen, maybe a little older, and there’s a piece of rubber wrapped tight around his bicep. The room smells like shit and vomit. When she puts a hand to the pulse in his throat, it’s far, far too fast, but at least he’s breathing. His eyes are flickering wildly beneath the lids.

When she looks at his face, though, it’s like being kicked in the guts. He looks like Luke. A young Luke, a skinnier Luke, a drugged-out and possibly dying Luke. But he looks like Luke. Jessica grits her teeth. “Fuck.” _No time for this, Jones._ He’s alive, and he’s breathing, at least for now. And it’s not like she can yank drugs out of him with her mind.

She calls an ambulance—puts on a Spanish accent, says a cop has been shot, resolves to deal with the fallout later—and looks back at the boy once before leaving the room. She caves in the ribcage of the man on the floor as she goes. She’s pretty sure that’s what Trish would call _vindictive._ She’s also pretty sure that these bastards deserve a hell of a lot more than a few shattered ribs, so she doesn’t actually give a shit.

In the main body of the warehouse, someone’s shut off the lights. Moonlight shines in jagged pieces through the boarded-up windows as Jessica bounces on the balls of her feet, and then jumps again, heaving herself up into the latticework of boards keeping the roof over their heads. She can make out a few still forms on the floor when her eyes adjust, but more movement, too. There’s a guy on the catwalk with a rifle—military grade, she thinks—and she settles herself over his head, watching. He’s not tracking anything in particular, not yet. Soldier Bozo puts two fingers to his ear. “Anything?”

There’s no response that she can hear, but the answer’s obvious enough in the way that he sucks his teeth and goes back to peering through the scope. They haven’t found Lilith or Daredevil yet, then. She thinks of the gunshots, of the screams, and wonders if this is typical for these two, slinking in and out of the dark. It’s a lot more subtle than she was expecting, and probably scary as shit for the guys they’re hunting down. Jessica curls her hands around the base of her makeshift seat, and swears to herself. She can’t exactly leave this guy here, not with an infrared scope and a sniper rifle in his hands. _God, I hate guns._ She hates guns and she hates the people who use them. Her shoulder fucking burns.

She’s still debating when Soldier Bozo goes freakish still underneath her, and touches a hand to his ear again. “I have her,” he says, and there’s no time left to argue with herself. Jessica shifts her weight, judges the distance, and then slides off the boards and right onto the guy’s back just as he pulls the trigger. She’d _meant_ to catch him in the head with her hands, but he readjusts his grip on the rifle at just the wrong moment, so she ends up smacking her fists into his shoulders instead. It works just as well, though. The sniper rifle hits the metal of the catwalk with a clang that makes her teeth rattle, but he’s down for the count, and when she checks his pulse, his heart’s still beating. Down below, someone curses. “What the _hell—_ ”

Electricity crackles, and then the warehouse is silent again. In spite of herself, the hair is standing up on the back of her neck. _Yeah,_ she thinks, looking down into the dark where she’d seen a flare of blue-white light, where Lilith is probably still hiding. _Yeah, they’re scary as shit._

There’s the blast of a gun, the buzzing ping of a bullet hitting the catwalk by her feet. There’s another guy about twenty feet down. Jessica jumps back up into the rafters again, wishing she’d thought to put on a black T-shirt instead of leaving her white tank on (because nothing screams _I’m here, come get me_ like white in the dark) and clambers higher into the ceiling. This guy only has a semiautomatic, at least. No infrared sight. This Batman shit is making her shoulder hurt like all hell, though, so she doesn’t bother waiting long. Jessica swings herself down, hangs with one hand for a second or two, just long enough for him to pass underneath her, and then lands hard on the catwalk and throws the guy off into the main body of the warehouse.

Okay, no, she didn’t kill him. He lands pretty damn hard on a stack of boxes about twenty feet down, but she doesn’t kill him. She doesn’t like killing people. ( _—wet snap of his neck between her hands and say it, smile, say you love me—_ ) When she vaults down after him, he’s still breathing, though, so that’s good enough for her. “There’s another one!” someone shouts from down below, and she ducks behind another box, waiting for more gunshots. Instead, there’s a rush of movement from the box above her head (and what the _fuck_ , no one had been there a second ago, what the _actual_ fuck) and then a strangled, guttural sound, like someone getting punched in the guts. And actually, when she looks, that’s precisely what’s happened. It’s Daredevil, this time. He looks up at her, still and silent for a moment. Then he flares four fingers at her— _four left—_ before slinking back into the dark.

The last four are easy to mop up. By the time Jessica’s clambered down off the boxes (she tears her jeans again, which, fucking brilliant, Jessica) three more are already unconscious. The last one gets dragged out from between two rows, and when Daredevil tosses the guy’s gun away, Jess picks it up and bends it into a useless knot. She’s not sure if she’s depressed by how big the guy’s eyes get, or hysterically amused. Could be both at this point.

“Ten minutes, huh,” says Lilith. She comes out of nowhere, ends up right at Jess’s shoulder, and Jessica nearly punches her in the face. Because _Jesus Christ._ She puts a hand to her heart.

“Gimme a little warning, woman, holy shit.”

“Sorry.” Lilith doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Habit. I think I have you clocked at seven.”

“So glad to beat your record.” Jessica scowls. “I want to talk to him.”

“He’s in a bad mood today, so I dunno if you’ll get the chance.” Lilith watches as Daredevil slams the last conscious guy up against a stack of boxes, speaking low and fast and furious, and her red mouth curves again. “Sorry. Kind of a shit deal, I know.”

Jessica shoves her hands into her pockets, watching. “Guy has issues.”

Lilith glances at her sidelong. Then she looks back at Daredevil. She doesn’t respond. “They’ve cleared a lot of the kids out of this location already. Looks like they were shifting to a new hidey-hole. There’re a few rooms with scientific equipment down that way, if you’re interested. Why’d you call the police?”

Jess opens her mouth, and shuts it again. _Amendment: not scary as shit. Creepy as all hell._ “Not the police. Ambulance. Kid upstairs needs help.”

“There’s someone left upstairs?”

“Druggie.”

Lilith’s mouth thins. “Show me.”

The boy’s still alive, which unwinds some kind of knot in her throat that really shouldn’t be there at all. Lilith’s mouth goes paper white at the sight of him, even underneath the lipstick. She darts forward, peels off her gloves. Her hands are pale, and there’s a scar through the back of the left. “Ty,” she says, and peels one eyelid back, checking his pulse. “Jesus Christ. Can you hear me?”

“You know this kid?”

Lilith shakes that off like she’s shooing away a fly. “And he was like this when you found him?”

“Yeah.”

She undoes the rubber tourniquet with shaking fingers. “And there was no one else was in the room?”

“Other than the guys who made interesting holes in the wall? No. Why?”

“Ty doesn’t go anywhere without Tandy,” says Lilith. She drags a coat off of one of the unconscious guards, rolls it up, sticks it under the kid’s head. She looks genuinely scared, for the first time, and Jessica starts wondering if Ty is a little like her Malcolm. “If he’s here alone, then—then Tandy must be somewhere else.”

“Or dead.”

“Or dead,” Lilith repeats, in a sick sort of way. She presses her palm to Ty’s forehead. “How far off are they? The ambulance.”

“I mean, I called them like five minutes ago.”

She doesn’t answer. She cocks her head, and uses a corner of the sleeve to wipe drool and vomit off the edge of Ty’s mouth.

“You came here looking for this kid, didn’t you?” says Jessica. “Or, well. The pair of them.”

“We came looking for all of them.” She pulls her gloves back on, and touches Ty’s cheek once. Her accent’s so thick now that it’s like wading through soup. “We’ve been looking into this since the first two deaths. Same way we did with Kilgrave.”

Jessica doesn’t freeze, but she wants to. There’s still the instinctive cut-and-run terror that hits every time she hears Kilgrave’s name. She closes her eyes when Lilith can’t see, thinks. _Birch Street. Higgins fucking Drive._ “You were looking into Kilgrave?”

“From the other end. You beat us to the punch, there. Not that I’m complaining. From what I heard, the bastard needed to die.” Outside, sirens start to wail. “We’d already wrecked three drug-centers when Tandy and Ty disappeared. They’re—I’ve met them before. They’re good kids. They don’t deserve this.”

Well, this is fucking squishy as hell. “You know the mortality rates for this shit.”

Lilith snaps a look at her, and then settles. “Yeah, I do.”

Neither of them say anything for a moment.

“I’m gonna go talk to the guy downstairs.”

“No point. He’s unconscious. I’ll get you the information.” She looks back at Jessica. “You should probably get your ass out of here before they arrive.”

“What about you?”

“I’m staying to make sure they pick up Ty okay.” She flaps her hands. “ _Go._ I’ll find you when this is done. I know where to look.”

“What the hell is—”

“485 West Forty-sixth, fifth floor, Alias Investigations.” Lilith flaps her hands again. “Get out of here, _go_. You’ll be in a hell of a lot of trouble if the cops find you still here. _Go_.”

Jessica goes. She hesitates. But she goes.

.

.

.

Malcolm doesn’t just fuss—he delivers a full-blown lecture when she stalks back into her office at nearly dawn, her nose still bloody and her shoulder feeling as though it’s been put through a meat grinder. The thing with Malcolm’s lectures is that he never really gets loud; he just has this way of saying “Really? _Really_?” that makes her feel like she’s been shrunk down to pocket-sized and then getting stomped on. It’s really unacceptable. For example: “Really, Jess? You were shot at? Again? _Really?_ Dodge, please.” Or: “Really. That’s—that’s a bootprint on your face. _Seriously_?”

“Either help me or judge me but don’t do both, asshole,” Jessica says, and Malcolm shuts up. Which for some reason is worse than the judging, because his silence is made almost entirely of exasperation.

Jessica wraps her shoulder herself, but lets Malcolm do horrible things to her nose under the guise of setting it, because his hands are shaking and he needs _something_. Once it’s taped, he heads into her kitchen, and wets down another washcloth. “What the hell did you think you were doing? Waging a one-woman war?”

“Nah, already done that this month. This was just…bullshit.” The whiskey burns at the cuts on the inside of her mouth. Her jaw isn’t broken, at least. “Shit, that hurts.”

“That’s because you’re applying alcohol to open wounds. You should know this. You get your ass kicked enough.” Malcolm comes back in, gives her the washcloth. Jessica dabs carefully under her nose. The whiskey’s shit cheap, but the burn is familiar, and it helps put warmth back into her fingers and toes. “Seriously, Jessica, what the hell. What made you think going after a gang of drug dealers on your own was a _good_ idea? Because I assume it was a gang. Usually you don’t get your face smashed in with a baseball bat unless it’s, you know. A lot of people.”

She thinks of the girl in the alley, needles in her eyes, blood on her skirt. “Doesn’t matter.”

Malcolm breathes in and out through his nose, and lets it go. “Well, did you find anything out, at least?”

“Yeah.” She probes at one of her molars with her tongue. It feels loose. _Shit._ “Lilith’s weird and Daredevil’s _fucking crazy_.”

In the kitchen, Malcolm fumbles the glass. It clatters against the inside of the sink at a volume that makes her head want to explode. “ _What_?”

“Lock up when you leave,” she says, and takes her bottle and her phone into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Lilith might show up tonight, or she might not, and either way, she’s not about to lose any sleep over it.

She wakes up when Trish calls her at ass o’clock (it’s barely eleven, Trish knows not to call before noon, she _knows_ and Jess is going to _kill her_ ) to let her know that she has a new box of files, please come and look at them, and “oh, by the way, Malcolm said you were shot at last night, which we need to talk about.” Which, _thanks_ , Malcolm. She hangs the phone up and stares at it for a minute or two before tugging the blankets back over her head, and cursing under her breath.

“It’s nearly noon, you know,” says Malcolm from in the office. He must have let himself in again to sit the desk, just in case. “Though granted, you were out until five AM.”

“You’re a fucking rat,” says Jessica through the sheets, but it comes out as utter gibberish. Malcolm ignores it.

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Feels like a trucker decided to go to town.” She glares at him from a crack in the covers. “What the fuck are you even doing here this early?”

“Heading you off before you can sneak out,” says Malcolm, and leans his shoulder against her doorframe. Not for the first time, Jessica thinks, quite uncharitably, that he looks like a walking Q-tip. Skinny as shit, but fluffy at the top. “Which you would have.”

“Bite me.”

“You met the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, Jessica. That—that kind of deserves some explanation.” He considers. “Though it was going to happen eventually. Hell’s Kitchen is tiny when you think about it.”

“It’s too fucking early for this,” she says into the blankets.

“You want to talk about early, someone came by at like…eight am to give you this.” When she peeks out of her nest again, he’s holding up a business card. “It’s a legal firm, I think. I called this morning, and it sounds like they’re expecting you sometime today.”

“What the fuck.”

“You don’t know what’s going on, either?”

“God, no.” She’s awake, now. She can’t help it. Jessica flings back the blankets, and scowls at the ceiling. “What firm? Not Hogarth, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” Malcolm’s voice doesn’t change, but his mouth twists. He’s about as fond of Jeri Hogarth as he is of poisonous snakes. He looks down at the card again. “They have a website, but it’s small. Looks like they’re just starting.”

“Then what the fuck do they want me for?”

“Who knows.”

Jessica looks at the window, and thinks.

“So,” says Malcolm. “Lilith. And _Daredevil._ ”

“Yup,” she says, flatly. “They’re fucking crazy.”

“Daredevil and _Lilith_.”

She scowls at him again. “Why the hell are you stuck on this?”

“Why the hell aren’t you?” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Seriously, Jessica. Those two are—they’re kind of famous. Hell’s Kitchen heroes.”

“They’re just people who like to dress up in leather catsuits and beat the shit out of bad guys,” says Jessica. “Not really my type.”

“But you went on what, a playdate with them to beat up _more_ bad guys?”

She shifts, uncomfortable. “Lilith asked.”   

“She _asked,_ ” Malcolm repeats. For some godforsaken reason, he actually sounds pleased. “You like her, don’t you? Lilith.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve never heard of you doing anything for somebody just because they _ask._ ”

“I do that shit all the time, asshole.” She peers down the inside of her tank top. Her ribs are mottled purple and black, and there’s blood spotting at the gauze on her shoulder, but other than that she seems all right. “Either get me my coffee or go away, Malcolm. I can’t deal with your psychiatric voodoo bull right now.”

“Please. You’ve had worse mornings.” He fiddles with the card. “You gonna go see these lawyers?”

“Fuck off,” says Jessica, and mashes the pillow over her head. She regrets it when it jams her broken nose. By the time her ears stop ringing, Malcolm’s whistling cheerfully in the kitchen, burning toast by the sound and smell of it. Brazen little shit. At least he’s not stealing her peanut butter anymore.

Jessica heads into the bathroom, and slams the door behind her.

The address on the card— _Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis_ , it reads, in careful script, not too flowy, not too sharp—leads her to an office on the second floor of a building that probably ought to be condemned. The brass nameplate is nice, though, nicer than the neighborhood, even with the frizzy-haired kid squatting underneath it. He shifts to his feet when Jessica stops. “You Jessica Jones?”

Jessica frowns. She’s popped four aspirin in the past hour and her nose _still_ hurts. “Who are you?”

“Santino.” He has hoops in his ears, and a sliver of a scar in the space between his nose and mouth, like his lip was split. Santino eyes her for a moment. There’s a shabbiness to him that’s less artful and more street-born, but she’s pretty sure he’s not homeless. His hair and skin are too clean for that. Nor does he move like a druggie, which is her next option. (And how pathetic is her life, that the people who recognize her on the street are either homeless or drug addicts or homeless drug addicts.) “Reynardine said that you were good.”

Reynardine. “You know Reynardine?”

“We’re friends,” says Santino. He hooks his hands into his pockets. “You’re kinda tiny.”

“And you’re kinda stringy,” Jessica snaps. “What the hell do you want?”

“Reynardine said you were looking into what’s happening with the needled kids,” says Santino. Jessica hides her hands in the pockets of her pea coat, clenches them into fists. “You heard anything new about any of that?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Well, not my business.” He tips his head towards the sign. “Their business.”

“They want to talk to me because, what, I’m investigating it?”

“Kid was brought in last night on drug charges. They’re handling the case.” Santino shrugs. “Said they wanted to know as much as they could about the whole thing, and Reynardine had told me about you. So I told them, and they said they wanted to talk to you.”

She doesn’t like the sound of any of this. “You’re the one who came to the offices this morning.”

Santino shrugs again. “Reynardine said you were good.”

 _God fucking dammit, Reynardine._ “Right,” she says, and steps past him to yank open the door. “Which shark am I talking to?”

Santino snorts.

For all the outside of the building looks like a drug house, the office itself is neat. It’s been painted recently, by the smell of things. There’s even a fake potted plant in the corner, though it’s droopy and depressed looking. A willowy, offensively put-together blonde emerges from behind the secretary’s desk, smoothing invisible wrinkles out of her skirt. She looks at Santino first, and then at Jess again. She doesn’t flinch at the broken nose, though. Jessica’s opinion of her jumps, though whether it’s up or down, she couldn’t really say. “Can I help you?”

“This one’s mine,” Santino says, as if this is a regular thing. “Is _la tigresa_ in?”

 _La tigresa_? She’s way past starting to think this was a bad idea. “Who?”

“ _La tigresa_ ,” says the blonde woman, her mouth quirking up, “is out at a lunch meeting, and I don’t know when she’ll be back. The other two are here, though, if they’re acceptable replacements.”

“ _Acceptable_ ,” says Santino, like this is something he has any sort of control over. He’s shifted personalities entirely. It’s unsettling. “What about Juan Carlos?”

The blonde woman bites back a wider smile. “Free and clear. It’s nice to meet you, by the way,” she adds to Jessica, and holds out one hand. “I’m Karen Page, I’m the secretary here.”

“In training to be a paralegal,” Santino corrects. Page’s cheeks pink up.

“Still the secretary.”

“Jessica,” Jessica says shortly, and lets go as soon as she can manage. Page doesn’t seem to be offended about it. “Who the fuck is Juan Carlos?”

“Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva,” says Santino, rolling it around in his mouth.

“There’s no Leiva on the nameplate.”

“That’s because Santino likes to come up with nicknames for people,” says Page fondly. “Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva is a blind lawyer in Cuba. The person Santino _calls_ Juan Carlos—Matt Murdock—he’s one of the partners here. The other one, _la tigresa_ , that’s Darcy Lewis.”

Another partner, then. “There’s a Nelson, too.”

“Face-Eating Foggy-Bear Nelson,” says Santino.

“ _God_ ,” someone says explosively from the brighter office. Jessica jumps. “What the _hell_ , Santino.”

Santino grins to himself, ducking his head, and traipses towards the brighter office. He stops just out of reach of the man who appears in the doorway, stocky with long hair and a mouth that looks used to smiling. His eyebrows have snapped together. “You,” he says to Santino. “You see if you get free donuts next time.”

“Sure you want to go back on your deal?”

Nelson makes a noise like a cat having its tail stepped on. “That’s _low._ You’ve been spending too much time with Kate.”

“You like Kate.”

“I don’t like Kate when she gives me weird nicknames and turns my Spanish tutors against me.”

“C’mon,” says a voice from the doorway. “It’s a good nickname and you know it. It’ll strike pure terror into the hearts of the prosecution.”

“Don’t you start,” Nelson says, but his lips are twitching as a petite brunette slips into the office, hair escaping her ragged bun to hang around her face. “You keep your nose out of this one.”

She ignores him. “ _And for the defense, your honor, Foggy-Bear Nelson, who eats the faces of his victims in court without a care for health codes or sanitary face-consumption practices—_ ”

“Carl, that kills people,” says Nelson.

“What the fuck,” Jessica says, not bothering to keep her voice down, because this may be the oddest legal firm she has ever seen.

“I swear we’re usually more professional than this,” says the brunette. She sticks out her hand too. She hasn’t taken her gloves off yet, and the wool scrapes at Jessica’s split knuckles. “Darcy Lewis. Or _la tigresa_ , I guess. You’re the one Santino talked about, the private investigator. I didn’t expect you to show up this early.”

“My assistant—” it still feels really weird to call Malcolm her assistant; the word tastes funny in her mouth “—said that sooner would be better.”

“Ah.” Lewis eyes her for a moment longer, and then drops her hand. “Well, yeah. I feel like your definition of _sooner_ is different than ours, but—Karen?”

“You’re fine for the next few hours,” says Karen Page, without looking up from her files. In the door of his office, Nelson’s watching them, his arms crossed over his chest. He’s not flinching at the bruises on her face, either. She’s not sure why that’s freaking her out as much as it is. “Just walk-ins. Why are you back already? I thought you’d be out until three.”

“I reserved my right to refuse the business of those one might term _douchebags_ ,” says Lewis. She looks at Nelson. “Foggy? You coming?”

“I’m staying out of this one. I have enough to do.” Nelson gives Jessica one last look—if Jessica didn’t know better, she’d say it was a challenge—and then steps back into his office again. Lewis’s mouth quirks up, like he’s done something funny. She slants a look at Jessica.

“Foggy’s protective. Doesn’t trust PIs. Come on, our office is this way.”

 _Our office_ makes more sense when Lewis opens the door to the darker office to reveal that there are two desks crammed inside. The lights are also off. Lewis flicks the switch. “You did the thing again.”

There’s a man sitting at the desk further from the door, back to the window. Despite the light situation, he’s wearing sunglasses, and it takes a moment before it clicks in Jessica’s head. _Blind._ Juan Carlos, the blind lawyer from Cuba. Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer from…who the fuck knows where. He tugs an earbud free, tips his head at Lewis. “Hm?”

“The light thing. You did the light thing again.”

Murdock’s eyebrows lift. “I thought you were going to be gone until three.”

“Technically I was going to be, until the client turned out to be a waste of space and time. Time-space continuum trash.” Lewis dumps her bag on the other desk, and gestures Jessica forward. The space is much warmer and a lot less utilitarian than Hogarth’s office, crammed in a way that’s comfortable rather than impossible. Someone’s set a whiteboard into the wall, and scrawled all over it in absolutely lousy handwriting. Dates and times, mostly. It looks like the right-hand side is almost entirely acronyms. She can’t make heads or tails of it. “Matt, this is the private investigator Santino said was—” She stops. “Sorry. I don’t—actually know your name.”

“Jessica,” says Jessica shortly. On second thought, she tugs a bent business card out of the back pocket of her jeans, and offers it to Lewis. “Jones.”

“Cool. More alliteration.” Lewis looks from Jessica to the empty chair in front of Murdock’s desk, and then tugs off her pea coat. “But yeah. Jessica Jones, PI, meet Matt Murdock, attorney. And…I’m the odd one out here. Whatever.”

Jessica kind of wants to smack this woman until she starts making sense. That, or she stops being ridiculous. “I’m here because Santino said you wanted information?”

“We heard you were looking into the rash of drug-related deaths in Hell’s Kitchen at the moment.” Murdock doesn’t jump when Lewis comes around to stand by his chair, leaning back against the edge of the window. “We were wondering if you’d be interested in working with us.”

Jessica folds her arms over her stomach. “I don’t talk about active cases.”

“Neither do we, funnily enough,” says Lewis. She tips her head back, and yanks the pencils out of her hair. It falls in a mess down her back, the same color as oversteeped tea. “We’re not looking to hire you, Jessica. It’s more like a share-deal. We’re looking for information that could help our client in court, and judging from what your assistant had to say to Santino, you’re looking for more cases that aren’t jackass spouses doing the nasty in back alleyways.”

 _Malcolm, I’m going to fucking kill you._ “It pays the bills. Mostly.”

“We’ve been talking about it.” Lewis knocks her hip into the side of Murdock’s chair without thinking about it. “We took on a case this morning—yes, this morning, I told you our definitions of _sooner_ were different. I didn’t expect to hear from you until the end of the week at least.”

Which means she could have slept more. _Goddammit._

“There was a boy found at a crime scene last night. He’s in a coma, currently. A runaway, from the look of things. The thing is, though, he was the only one left behind at the scene, which was…pretty wrecked, all things considered. There’s evidence of drug use. If he wakes up—” her mouth thins “—the DA’s probably going to press charges for possession and use of…whatever it is he has in his system.”

“You’re doing the case pro bono?”

“Typically we would, but this is a special circumstance. Apparently this kid has friends in high places.” Lewis pushes her glasses up her nose. “Like I said, we didn’t expect you here so soon. But from little I know about this sort of thing, I think the general consensus is you get fifteen percent of the eventual bill, if you agree to take on the case.”

“Which is?”

“His benefactor—” Jess doesn’t like that word, much, _benefactor_. First question on a list of several—who is this benefactor and why the hell Lewis is talking around the name. “—seems to think that there’s no way this kid would be into drugs, and judging from what little I’ve gleaned about him from people who know him, I have to agree. Obviously that’s not a guarantee that he _wasn’t_ using, but still.”

“The circumstances also imply a certain level of coercion or force in regards to his drug use,” says Murdock. He cocks his head a little. Light catches on the rims of his glasses. “Though understandably it’ll be difficult to find tangible evidence of that.”

 _You’re still asking, though_ , she thinks, frowning at the pair of them. Lewis is clicking her back molars together. It’s obnoxious. “And what exactly do you want me to do? For fifteen percent.”

“Get whatever you can on this kid,” says Murdock. “Background, known associates. Whether or not he has a record. As a black boy the jury’s already going to have a problem with him; person of color with a drug charge, even worse.”

“What if he turns out he took this drug willingly?”

“Then we salvage the case and you still get your fifteen percent.” Murdock’s eyebrows creep closer together. “If you’d rather not take the case, it’s fine. You came recommended, that’s all.”

“By Reynardine,” says Jessica. “If you’re taking your recommendations from strung-out street kids, you clearly have no idea what you’re doing.”

Lewis shrugs. “We trust Santino. Santino trusts Reynardine. And Reynardine trusts you. Enemy of my enemy. Or friend of my friend, I suppose.”

Fifteen percent versus probably running into Lilith and the Psycho again. If they’re looking into this case, Jessica thinks, she’s _definitely_ going to run into them again. Fifteen percent or sanity. “Bump it up to eighteen.”

“Sixteen,” says Lewis.

“Seventeen,” says Murdock, “before you two argue yourselves to a standstill.”

“Fine,” says Jessica. “Seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” Lewis repeats, and nods once. “Okay. Seventeen.”

“Okay.” Jessica pulls her phone from her back pocket, swipes open her note app. “What’s this kid’s name, anyway?”

“Tyrone Johnson,” says Murdock. “Apparently, he goes by Ty.”

Jessica nearly drops her phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jessica is the smoothest most graceful swan-like vigilante on the fucking planet and I will fight you. #grumpyroadkillcactuscat


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, y'all. Just FYI: for every single thing I post, I have like five more things in the works at once, so long breaks aren't me neglecting you; they're me working on other things as well as this, and Alix has terrible time management skills. (Alix also works full time, so...)
> 
> Some triggers for: Discussion of drugs and drug use, discussion of human experimentation, mentions of rape, hospitalization, discussion of broken bones/bruises/cuts, discussion of attempted murder (gunshots), discussion of violence, alcoholism (Jessicaaaaa), minor grumpiness, and Kate being ridiculous.
> 
> I've boosted the chapter count to four, since this one was getting too long. So.
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

It’s six hours and a long fruitless hunt through the depths of the homeless underbelly of the city later when Jessica clambers over the railing of Trish’s balcony. Trish leaves the balcony door unlocked, now—it gives Jess hives, because if she can jump, there have to be other people who can fly, namely, Iron Man’s sketchy-ass cousin or some other shit—but Trish won’t listen to reason about this. “I want you to be able to get in if and when you have to,” she’d said, with her jaw set in the way that means, shut up, Jess, you know I’m right. She’s used that same face since they were sixteen and it’s never been any less ridiculous. “So I’m leaving the balcony door open. Quit arguing with me.”

(She’d argued anyway, obviously, because she’s right and Trish is wrong and she will someday force Trish to see sense about that. It went mostly like this:

“But what about—”

“No.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I do know.”

“If there are other powered people then—”

“Can Luke fly?”

“What?”

“Can Luke fly?”

“No, but—”

“Since he’s the only other powered person you’ve met that hasn’t been shaped like a walking toothpick, and he can’t manage it, I’ll take my chances. You want chow mein or kung pao chicken?”)

“Malcolm told me you have a new case,” says Trish, in a careful voice. Jessica doesn’t look up from her box of chow mein, waiting for her computer to load up the last of Ty Johnson’s social media pages. He hasn’t used any of them in a while, from what she can tell, but she’d found a username listed underneath his Facebook profile information (no phone number, which, well played, kid, but Twitter, Skype, Pinterest, and Tumblr are all listed, and are all linked with the name _croakadil_ , so she has that in her search engines now). “With drug addicts?”

“Malcolm talks too much.” Jessica hits the space bar a few times, which does absolutely nothing, but makes her feel better. She just remembers to pull back before she cracks it into pieces with her thumb. “It’s just another case. Don’t do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“You’re doing that stupid-ass thing where you think that I’m gonna trip over my own feet and break my fucking nose or something. So stop it.”

Trish opens her mouth to protest. Then she shuts herself up tight again, and stabs at her kung pao chicken with her chopsticks. (They’re the nice kind, a gift from a fan in Tokyo or something, Jessica doesn’t know. All she knows is that they’re a lot shinier than Jessica’s shitty one-use chopsticks that came with the delivery. Trish had tried to spot her a pair, but the shiny ones never work for her the way the shit ones do. She has no clue why.) There’s a good thirty seconds of silence (the search engine clicks away) before Trish can’t stand it anymore. “You were shot last night.”

“Correction. I was shot at last night. The bullet only clipped me, no big deal.”

“Someone’s shooting at you for this case, Jess! That’s a big deal.”

“Not to me.”

“To me,” Trish snaps. “To me that’s a big deal.”

And for some reason ( _c’mon, Jess, you know exactly what reason_ ) that hurts like one wicked motherfucker. “Quit worrying. I’m fine, I heal fast.”

“It’s not the healing bit I’m worried about.” Trish puts her chopsticks down, and shoves the plate away from her. (Something else Jessica doesn’t get: Trish actually puts her take-out on a plate. It’s a travesty.) “Seriously, Jess, you went and picked a fight with the fucking Maggia. You picked a fight with the Maggia and you didn’t tell me you were planning to do it. I have a right to be pissed about that, and don’t you dare say I don’t.”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s the Maggia.”

“Oh,” says Trish acidly. “Like that makes it better. We don’t know for sure that it’s the Maggia. We don’t know for sure that it’s not Satan, either, but I’m gonna listen for cloven hooves, okay?”

“Don’t be bitchy.”

“Don’t be an asshole, then.”

Jessica shoves her chopsticks into the box straight up (which makes Trish wince) and swipes her thumb across the mousepad. “What the fuck do you want me to do, Trish?”

“Maybe, I don’t know, call me before you head off for the docks to pick a fight with a bunch of gang enforcers?” She lifts one eyebrow, archly. “What the fuck happened? I thought—I thought we had a system, now. I thought you knew to call me when stuff like this happened. What changed?”

( _There’s a body on the ground and it’s a girl, she’s fourteen and her skirt’s rucked up and Jess knows, she knows that the girl had to have been dead, there are needles in her eyes, fluid on her cheeks and blood on her clothes, but Jess looks at her and all she can see is Hope—_ )

“I found a lead,” says Jessica. “I found a lead, and it was the middle of the night, so I followed it. I don’t need to check in with you for every little thing I do, Trish.”

“Hey,” Trish snaps, and Jessica shuts her mouth. It’s automatic, from years of habit, and she wants to stab someone for doing it, but she does it. “What the fuck, Jess? You haven’t been like this since before—”

She stops. _Before Kilgrave,_ she’d meant to say. _Before Kilgrave came back. Before you snapped his neck with your bare hands._ Jessica stabs at her food again, and thinks about diving right back out the window. It’d be a hell of a lot easier than sitting around listening to this. She feels very small. “I didn’t think about it,” she says, finally. She hadn’t really been thinking at all, but that’s neither here nor there. “I was just following a lead, Trish. That’s all.”

Trish watches her for a moment. Then she drops her eyes to her plate. “Who even put you onto this case, anyway? I thought you were looking into that thing for Hogarth.”

“Hogarth can go fuck herself,” Jess says. “I need her, sure, but I’m not her lapdog. I finished the divorce thing ages ago. Married dude cheating on his husband, whatever. Happens all the time.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

Jesus. “The fact that they’re killing kids isn’t enough?”

“Don’t you ask me something like that.” Trish glares. “You know exactly why I’m angry about this, Jess. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

Yeah. She knows. She hates it, but she knows. Fleeing out the window sounds like a really good idea right now. She’s halfway out of her seat when Trish sighs, tight through her nose, and says, “Can you at least—call me when you get shot at? Or to let me know you’re okay when you come home with a broken nose and new friends.”

Jessica stares at her. Trish stares back, unblinking, waiting. Her eyes are very blue, Jess thinks. It’s not fair for eyes to be that blue. Slowly, she sinks back into her chair. “They’re not my friends.”

“Well, according to Malcolm—”

She wants to hiss. _Malcolm._

“—they’re sure as hell acting like your friends.”

Jessica snorts. “Since when do I have friends?”

This time both of Trish’s eyebrows go up. “You want me to answer that?”

“Not really.”

“There’s a surprise.” Trish picks up her chopsticks again, and sorts through her chicken for a minute or two. Jessica’s scanning through the most recent post made on Ty Johnson’s Blogspot account (dated about three months ago, but it’s more recent than anything else she’s found) when she says, “What are they like?”

“What are who like?”

“Don’t get cute with me, Jess.”

“Ugh, fine.” She leans back into the pillows. “They’re like what you think they’re like. A pair of psychotic idiots with performance issues.”

Trish’s eyebrows are so high that Jess is pretty sure that they’re going to merge with her hairline. “Performance issues?”

“You have any other reason for why they’d go with outfits like that? And no, that wasn’t a serious question.”

“I mean, I doubt anyone who’s come close enough to see their outfits in any detail has actually come out of it without broken bones and burns.” Trish turns a piece of red pepper over and over in her kung pao chicken, staring off into nothing. “Y’know, I kind of wonder what the suits are made of. The devil used to just use a black mask and cargo pants, not the whole—” she waves a hand around her face. Jess thinks she might be trying to indicate horns, but it looks more like she’s trying to shoo away a mosquito. “There has to be something else going on there.”

Jess opens her mouth, and closes it again. _They don’t move like they’re dressed in Kevlar,_ she nearly says, and she thinks Trish might believe her if she says it, but she’s not even sure of that. The memory of how people move in Kevlar is tainted with Kilgrave, something she can only remember snippets of, flashes and smears. She doesn’t trust her own mind, not when it’s stained in shades of purple. “Why are you asking me?”

“It was just a general question—but Jess, really, Malcolm’s not exaggerating?”

“Please, God, kill me now,” says Jessica, and nearly mashes her face into the nearest pillow. “They’re not my friends. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Trish gives up on her food. She sets her chopsticks in the sink, and goes to dig a Tupperware out of one of the cabinets. Jess finally flips a finger to Blogspot, and clicks over to Twitter again. “Just so you know, the likelihood of you avoiding them from now on is…probably kinda low.”

“Don’t remind me.” She’s scrolling through posts from five, six, seven months ago when a photo finally catches her eye. It’s a dark shot, kind of blurry in the way cell phone snaps will always be if you take them in dark bars. She doesn’t recognize anything in the background. There’s a girl sitting with her chin hooked over Ty’s shoulder, blonde and greasy-haired, with a smile like Natalie Dormer’s and a face that, just for a second, flashes into Hope’s. Then it settles back into reality again. This girl is thinner-faced and finer-boned than Hope, and she’s wearing round professor glasses. The only tagline is _with @tbow_. Jess pushes her chow mein onto the coffee table, and sets her laptop on her knees. “What’s your Twitter username?”

“What?” Trish pulls her head out of the fridge. “Why do you need my Twitter username?”

“I don’t need it. Just wondering if you do the stupid thing that most people do and put part of your surname into it.” @tbow. Lilith had mentioned a girl named Tandy. Ty doesn’t go anywhere without Tandy. There’s only one image of @tbow on the whole of Ty Johnson’s Twitter feed, but it’s enough. She pulls up Google, and types, _tandy bow missing child._ Three second search. 57,313 hits. At the very bottom of the first page, there’s a small article in a glit mag marked _Melissa Bowen mourns loss of only child._ Jess swipes her thumb back and forth over the mousepad. “You ever hear of Melissa Bowen?”

“I think she’s a model?” Trish knocks the door of the fridge with her hip, and digs into the freezer instead. “Gelato?”

“Booze.”

“Gelato,” Trish says again. Jess scoffs under her breath. “Why are you asking?”

Tandy Bowen, aged sixteen. The article’s a year and a half old. The school yearbook picture is of an altogether much more put-together, much less happy-looking blonde waif, her blue eyes blown wide with mascara and eyeliner. There’s something in the set of her jaw, in the weight of her lashes, in the way her mouth turns down a little and her gaze has skipped right of the camera, slightly unfocused, that makes Jess think: _Christ. She looks like Patsy._ “Uh.” She clears her throat, and scrolls back up to the top. “Looking for her daughter.”

“Melissa Bowen has a daughter?”

Well, that’s encouraging. At least she has a last name now. Jess bookmarks the article, and starts her crawl through Facebook, through Twitter, through everything else she can find. Tandy’s much more on top of the whole social media thing than Ty is. “Apparently.”

“Wait, what does this have to do with anything? Did Melissa Bowen hire you, or—?”

“It’s a lead.”

Trish goes quiet as she folds herself up into the couch next to Jessica, propping her chin in one hand and angling her face to get a better look at the computer screen. Tandy’s personal Facebook account isn’t active anymore, but her Twitter account (not @tbow, but the one still attached to her Facebook, @tandabown) leads to a MySpace, which leads to another Tumblr account, which four pages in leads to another Facebook page, the name listed under _T Benedick Hamilton_. The profile picture is of a bench with leaves on it, and out of the sixteen total posts, five of them have locational tags for events at a church in Hell’s Kitchen. Jess taps her spacebar in triumph, and snaps the thing in half. “Fucking hell.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I have to go.”

“I’m coming with you. Lemme change pants.”

“Trish—”

“I’m coming with you,” Trish says again, fiercely, and she slams the bedroom door behind her before Jess can say anything else. Slowly, Jess sinks back onto the couch cushions, and finishes off the last of her chow mein.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Chelsea is made of old stone. There’s a plaque on the gate that says it was built in the nineteenth century or something. Trish reads it. Jess doesn’t. Inside, yellow light spills like amber over the flagstones. An evening service, Jess realizes, listening to the murmuring from just outside the door. Trish sticks her hands in her coat pockets, and blows out a breath that looks like smoke. Neither of them have been very church-y since they bolted for the city, since they left Trish’s mom’s and didn’t have to Keep Up Appearances any longer. Sermons always made Jess want to fall asleep. Trish shifts from foot to foot, and sweat dabs at her temple. “You sure she’ll be in here?”

“I’m sure someone in here knows her, at least.” Jess glances at the gate. “How long do these things usually last?”

“I don’t know. A few hours?”

“Christ.”

Trish makes an odd little noise. “Probably not something you should say in a church.”

“Jesus can bite me.” There’s a bowl of water by the door that according to Jess’s vague memory has been blessed or purified or something. She doesn’t really want to touch it, so she shoves her hands deep into her sweatshirt pockets. “C’mon.”

“You’re going inside?”

“You see any other way to talk to the people who might know Tandy Bowen?”

Trish sucks her teeth, and then leads the way in to the cathedral.

There aren’t many people in here, not really. Maybe twenty, or a few more. Mostly older. Mostly white. Mostly women, to Jess’s surprise, though there are a few men scattered through the pews. Trish tugs at the edge of Jess’s sleeve, and herds them both into a pew at the back, where they stand out like boils. Well, Jess stands out. Trish is dressed in an eye-catching shade of red, but in here the color almost fades. Like it was never dyed at all. Jess keeps her hands fisted up in her pockets, and slouches. The priest is short and balding, with a quiet, echoey sort of voice that scrapes in odd places. He’s talking about humility, or something. She’s not listening particularly hard, not to the words, anyway. The other people in the room are more interesting, the way they’ve dressed, the way they sit. She discounts the quartet of nuns in the first row, since they’re probably attached to St. Agnes or some other church in the area. The businessman with the rough suit and the stubble, she discounts him too, because he’s either drunk, or asleep, or both, and she’s pretty sure that a girl who lived on the street would know better than to associate with old drunks. The older Hispanic woman three rows from the front, though, she’s a possibility. So is the quiet couple with grey hair leaning into each other like old fence posts. If anyone would know, it would be the priest. Jess pulls her phone out of her pocket, and holds it between her knees so Trish doesn’t hiss at her too much for being rude. St. Patrick’s Cathedral barely has a presence online, and the name of the priest isn’t listed, but she thinks it might start with L. There was a name on the door, under the schedule, but she can’t remember what it was.

The sermon lasts for another fifteen minutes, and when it’s over Trish grabs Jess’s wrist. “Wait for him to finish,” she says in a low voice, her shoulder pressed in close. “If anyone’s gonna know, it’ll be the father. You remember how Father Callum was, when we were in high school? He knew basically everything about the people who came in regularly.”

“He didn’t know about you,” Jess says without thinking. Trish’s mouth goes very thin. She closes her eyes for a moment.

“Tandy’s been here five or six times, you said. He should remember her. Just—wait until they’re done asking him questions.”

She has a feeling that Trish is trying to say _don’t be an asshole,_ but that’s impossible for her _not_ to do, so whatever. She scoffs under her breath. “Fine.”

For some stupid reason Trish grins at her. It’s the first time she’s actually smiled all night, and it’s kind of great. Then she turns her face away, and starts counting the pews with her eyes.

As it turns out, they don’t even have to make an excuse as to what they’re here for. The priest walks the old Hispanic woman to the door (they’re talking in soft Spanish, which Jess doesn’t know, but Trish cocks her head and listens like it’s a lesson in school), and sends her out into the night with a quiet “ _buenos noches_ ” before he turns to them, and says, “If you want to sneak in unnoticed, staring generally isn’t your best bet.”

Trish’s lips part. She shuts her mouth again. Jess says, “Whatever, man.”

“ _Jess._ ”

“I’m assuming you’re here about Tandy,” says the priest. He lifts his eyebrows. “That or to kill me, but if that was what you wanted, you’re not that good at it. I’ve seen scarier high school students.”

That’s because he hasn’t seen Trish on Simpson’s crazy pills, Jess thinks, but she at least keeps her mouth shut about that. “Why the fuck would I want to kill you? You’re a priest. Smack you around, sure, because priests are annoying as hell—”

“Oh my _God_ , Jess,” moans Trish, and puts her face in her hands.

“—but killing you isn’t on the agenda.”

“Excellent,” says the priest. “Because I have a baseball team to coach tomorrow. Coffee?”

“No,” says Jess. At the same time, Trish says, “Yes, please,” and hooks her nails into Jessica’s forearm to keep her from arguing. The priest looks from one of them to the other, and then laughs under his breath.

“This way.”

It takes a good ten minutes for the priest to get his shit together, setting up the coffee machine, humming under his breath. Lantom, her memory sparks. The name on the door had been Lantom. Father Lantom of St. Patrick’s, who apparently expects someone to walk into his church and kill him where he stands someday. Trish keeps her mouth shut and her hands folded neatly in her lap, knees together, schoolgirl training coming back the way athlete’s foot does. Jess can only keep her mouth shut for so long, though. He’s digging milk out of the fridge when she says, “Why’d you think we were here to kill you?”

“I talk to a lot of people in my line of work,” says Father Lantom, pulling half and half out too and setting it on the shitty table. “And Hell’s Kitchen has had a number of interesting characters show up in the past few months. Strangers in the neighborhood generally bring trouble.”

“We’re here to look for Tandy,” says Trish. She drops her hand to Jess’s knee, though she draws away before the priest can turn around again. “We think something’s happened to her.”

“If what I’ve heard is true, then you’d be right.” He taps his fingers to the top of the snarling coffee machine. “Either of you have names, or—” his lips twitch, like he thinks this is funny “—would you prefer to remain anonymous?”

“Jessica Jones,” says Jess shortly. She doesn’t have another card—she gave her last one to the crazies at Nelson, Murdock and Lewis—so she just shoves her hands back into her pockets. “I’m a detective. I’m trying to track Tandy down for a case.”

“Has she done something?”

“She’s disappeared, is what she’s done,” says Trish. She holds out a hand. Father Lantom takes it, and shakes twice. “Trish Walker.”

“From _TrishTalk_?” The priest blinks. “I listen to you in the afternoons, sometimes. You speak very well. I didn’t know you were going into detective work.”

Trish turns a bit pink. “Oh, um. I’m not. I just help.”

“Ah.” Lantom turns back to his coffee machine. “Well, I’m sorry to say that if you came here looking for Tandy, I can’t help you. I haven’t seen her in two weeks, not since her birthday. She and a friend of hers stay in the spare room behind the church, sometimes, when they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“That’s technically not legal,” says Trish. “If they’re runaways.”

“They’re runaways?” Lantom says, light and deliberately quizzical. His eyebrows go up. “Funny, they never told me that. And from what I remember, it’s illegal to harbor runaways, but if they’re simply homeless, well.” He shrugs. “Who does it hurt to give them a place to sleep for a night?”

A priest and altar boys joke is on the very tip of Jessica’s tongue, but Trish steps on her foot as soon as Lantom looks away again. She whines in the back of her throat, and then says, “You heard her friend’s in the hospital?”

“Tyrone? Yes, I did.” His brows snap together. “It’s unfortunate. I don’t know either of them very well—they’re very private, don’t talk much about themselves—but in my estimation neither of them would have been the type to fall into drugs. Tandy in particular. We’ve had a number of discussions about addiction. Here, actually,” he adds, like this is in any way relevant. Jessica sprawls in her chair, and looks up at the ceiling. “They’re very gifted, the pair of them.”

“Cute,” Jess says. “Very cute. When did they start coming here?”

“I’m sorry, but before I tell you—” He eyes Jess. “I have to ask: who is it you’re trying to find Tandy for?”

Jess stills. “Is there someone looking for her other than me?”

“Not that I’m aware of. But if you’re searching for her on behalf of her mother, then I’m afraid I have nothing to say.”

Next to her, Trish goes still, and _Christ_. The opening credits to _It’s Patsy_ are spiraling in the back of her head. “Tandy and her mother don’t get along?”

Lantom doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her for a long time. Then he shuts his eyes, and sighs. “Neither Tandy nor Ty like to talk about where they came from. But Tandy—there are certain things that Tandy does that make me wonder.”

If she hadn’t already been sure Trish was going to get herself in too deep with this one, Jess thinks, this would be the clinching moment. Trish swallows, barely noticeable to anyone other than Jess, and then says, “Oh,” in a small voice. It’s not an answer, not really. Except that it is. Jess presses her lips together for a moment. She tips her chair back onto its hind legs. “There are some lawyers looking into Johnson,” she says. “They asked me to find evidence to disprove whatever case the DA might have against him. If he ever wakes up.”

For some reason, Lantom relaxes all in a rush. He covers it up fast, but he does, the tension dropping away from him like old skin. “Ah,” he says. “One of them wouldn’t happen to be named Lewis, would they?”

Christ on a fucking hazelnut cracker. If those exist. “You know them?”

“I know Lewis, anyway.” He eyes Jess for a moment. “Tandy and Ty have been coming here on and off for the past five months or so. I didn’t expect them to come back after the first time, but they help a great deal, when they can. Sometimes Ty temps in the church office. Tandy does well with the youth groups.”

“And no one knows they’re homeless?”

“Not unless the pair of them mention it. Which they generally don’t, so far as I can tell.”

“I don’t understand.” Trish leans back in her seat, hooking her ankles together beneath the chair. “St. Patrick’s doesn’t have a very large youth program, does it? Why would they know to come here?”

Lantom doesn’t pause, exactly, but his hands do still on the coffee mugs, just for a moment, before he flips three right-side up. “A mutual friend asked if they could stay with me for a while, and I didn’t see any reason to say no. They come back every other week or so, especially on cold nights. They might come around even more often, but I wouldn’t be sure of that. I gave them a key, so they sometimes let themselves in and out without ever letting me know they’re here.”

“And you trust them?”

“I wouldn’t have let them in in the first place if I didn’t. Sugar?”

“Yes, please,” says Trish. Jessica shakes her head. Lantom considers her expression, and then just hands her the mug without doctoring it at all. Jess isn’t sure if she should be offended ( _am I that predictable?_ ) or pleased. Whatever.

“Who’s the mutual friend?” she says, hating the fact that it’s good coffee. Lantom’s mouth quirks up again.

“Sorry. Sanctity of the confessional.”

“Someone asked you to take care of two homeless runaways in _confession_?”

He toasts her with his mug, and doesn’t answer. Priests.

“Whatever,” Jessica says again. “Look, all likelihood is, this girl is dead. I’m trying to figure out if what happened to Ty Johnson happened to her, too. I need whatever you can tell me about what she does, where she goes, who she’d feel safe hiding with. If you can’t give me anything more, I don’t have a single fucking reason to be here any longer.”

Trish doesn’t even try to interrupt this time. Jess is pretty sure she’s just given up. Lantom hums, looks down into his mug for a moment. “They’re private,” he says again. “The pair of them. They rarely mentioned anyone to me, no place in particular.”

“None of that helps me.”

“I’m not finished,” says Lantom. Jessica shuts her mouth. Then she blinks, because since when has she turned into a person who shuts up? “They never told me anything. But I heard—”

“In confession?”

Lantom stops, and watches her for a moment. His mouth twitches once or twice. “Like I said. I heard that Tandy and Ty used to go to the local YMCA a great deal. Whether or not that’s true, I can’t say. You might start there.”

“She never said anything odd to you?” says Trish. “She never mentioned anything strange?”

For a second, Jessica thinks the priest might lie to them. He opens his mouth, shuts it again. Then he says, “The last time I saw her, she mentioned that there was a man talking to some homeless kids near Columbia. It was only in passing. I thought it was bothering her. When I asked, she wouldn’t say anything more about it.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say anything about him.” He shuts his eyes. “I think Tyrone might have implied that the man was a doctor, but other than that, I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“A doctor near Columbia,” says Jess. “Like that’s gonna be easy.”

“We might come back if we have more questions,” says Trish. She puts down her mug. It’s empty, though Jess can’t recall Trish ever taking a sip. “Thank you, Father Lantom. I’m sorry we interrupted your service.”

“Believe me, it’s not the worst thing that could have happened tonight.” He toasts them with his mug again. Jess puts hers on the table, and stands up. “Please let me know if you find anything out.”

“Of course.”

They’re halfway to the door when the chair scrapes. Lantom clears his throat. “Miss Jones. If Tandy’s alive, I would—I would appreciate it if you could help her. I know that’s not why you took the case. But I would appreciate it. She’s had enough happen to her, the past few years.”

Jessica can’t really find anything to say. She jerks her chin up, and stalks out of the church before she does something stupid.

.

.

.

Malcolm’s still awake and buzzing around the office when she and Trish finally roll in at about one in the morning, freezing and with red noses from wandering around Columbia. (Trish, Jess thinks, sourly, is not someone who should go looking for homeless kids. Her designer peacoat screams _Concerned Do-Gooder Adult_ , and that means that the kids want absolutely nothing to fucking do with her. She’s going to have to go back tomorrow, and won’t that be a fucking delight.) He looks lightly manic, his hair puffing wildly out of control. He’s stolen back her Central Park Zoo T-shirt, or never returned it after he dried out. She can’t remember. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want the thing back anyway. “Hey,” he says, when she kicks the door shut (lightly, so very lightly, but it still slams, and upstairs she hears Robyn make a high-pitched hwugh noise that usually means there’s going to be a lecture in a day or two). “Hey, um, did—someone left you this.”

He’s holding an envelope. It’s unmarked, and unsealed. Inside there’s a flashdrive and a note on purple memo-paper. Jess dodges when Trish tries to snatch at it, scowling a little at the spiky, curling handwriting. _FYI_ , is all it says, but the L at the bottom makes it pretty clear who it’s from. She tosses the note and the envelope in the trash, and palms the USB stick. “Where’d you find this?”

“I mean, I was just—I was sitting at the desk, and someone knocked on the window, and left it taped to the glass—I didn’t see them, but—Jess.”

“Fucking overdramatic.” Jess drops hard into the computer chair, and boots up the laptop. When she digs a half-empty bottle out of the right-hand file drawer and uncaps it, Trish gets a look on her face like she’s been pinched somewhere uncomfortable. She doesn’t say anything. “I’ll get you the information, she says. Jesus Christ.”

“Lilith?” Trish comes around the desk, rests her hand to the back of the chair so she can peer over Jess’s shoulder. “I didn’t know she knew where this place was.”

“And don’t think that doesn’t give me night terrors,” says Jess. Trish snorts. Malcolm has an expression that says he wants to laugh, but he’s a bit too constipated to manage it. There are six files on the drive, not even half a gigabyte. One’s a collection of video clips. Another, a bunch of screenshots of different news sites. The third is a scan of a police report, and holy shit, Jess does not want to think about how they managed to get their hands on that one. She skims the summary. “Where the hell did they get this?”

“Why the hell are they giving it to you?” Trish steals the mouse, and scrolls down. The file’s about a Maggia murder, six months old, maybe a little more. When she googles it, there’s only an inch in the New York Times, nothing else in any other print media. A site called The Urich Report has an article on it, though. “They put Fisk behind bars all on their own. This looks like—like hours of work.”

No, Jess thinks. She’s eyeing the articles, the painstakingly stitched video, the photographs. No, speaking as a professional? This level of background took days, at least. Probably longer. “It means I don’t have to do it, so.”

Trish nudges Jess with her hip (thankfully not in her bad shoulder) and scrolls through the article. “So this is where Ben went.”

“Huh?”

“Guy who used to work for the _Chronicle_. Didn’t know him all that well—radio talk-show hosts and metro reporters don’t intersect all that much—but he was a good guy. He left the paper a few months ago, broke a big story on Fisk towards the end. I didn’t know he was doing a blog.” She sucks her teeth, the _maybe I should get this person on the show somehow with my wily ways_ noise. “Looks like your BDSM friends think it’s the Maggia.”

“Potato, po-tah-to.” _Silvio Manfredi Returns from Sicily_ , says another article. Trish scrolls down, her mouth curving oddly. “What?”

“Nothing, just—Silvio Manfredi. He’s on the guest list to a thing I said I wasn’t going to.”

Jessica blinks. “Wait, what thing?”

“A fundraiser thing for women’s health.”

“A fundraiser for women’s health invited a Maggia gangster?”

“He donates a lot. I’m not saying I agree with it,” Trish says, before Jess can snap. She takes over the keyboard. “I think he’s an asshat and clearly he’s a criminal if Daredevil and Lilith have this much information stowed away, but a lot of people get money from him all over the city. It’s partially how he keeps out of the way of the police, I think.”

“And in his downtime he grabs kids off the street to inject with MGH. Nice guy you hang with, Trish.”

Trish gives her a filthy look. “Here it is,” she says. She clicks twice on a Facebook event. “At The Plaza, tomorrow night. I can probably still RSVP. I put down a maybe with the event and made a note on the RSVP card that I might not show, so they probably still have me on the guest list.”

“No way in hell are you going to go interrogate a Maggia crimelord alone at a frou-frou charity gig schmoozefest…thing.”

“Could you sound any more disgusted?” says Trish, and stands up straighter. “I’d be in the middle of a crowded room and there would be guards everywhere. It’s not like I’m gonna be following him into a dark alley in the middle of the night.”

Jess makes an impatient noise. “It’s not happening.”

“You have any other ideas about how to get to him without breaking into his house and holding him at gunpoint?” Trish cocks her hip out, lifts her eyebrows again. “C’mon, Jess.”

“No, Trish.”

“Fine,” Trish says. “Then you come too. I should probably bring a date anyway.”

Jess has no idea what to say to this. She closes her mouth. Opens it. Shuts it up again. It’s not the first time that Trish has dragged her along to stupid events since Trish finally wormed her way back into Jess’s daily life, but just—Jesus. “I’d punch him in the face.”

“No, you wouldn’t, because that would ruin all my relationships with my investors, and I need them to keep the show on the air for the next six months.”

“The show generates enough revenue you could get by all on your own, Millionaire Joe.”

“Can you quit with the references? This isn’t _Mad Max_. It’s a charity event where we may possibly run into a guy who may possibly be a Maggia boss who may possibly be taking homeless kids off the street and killing them with drugs.” Trish stops, and wrinkles her nose. “…that sounded a lot better in my head.”

Jess is still stuck on _I should probably bring a date anyway_. “I don’t—I wear the same pair of jeans every day, Trish.”

“That’s easy. We can get something tomorrow.”

“You’re not buying me clothes.”

“It’s a loan. I can give it back later. I do that all the time.”

“Trish—”

“This isn’t that hard, Jess.”

Malcolm, who’s stayed so quiet that Jessica had genuinely forgotten he was there at all, clears his throat. “Um. You want me to ask Reynardine if any other kids have gone missing?”

Shit. “Yeah.” Jess grabs her jacket off the back of the chair, and swings it on again. “I’m gonna go see if I can get into Ty Johnson’s hospital room.”

“You’re not a relative, they won’t let you in.”

“He’s at Metro-General,” says Jess. “I think I can wrangle something.”

.

.

.

Claire takes one look at Jess and rolls her eyes so hard that Jess is pretty sure they’re gonna fall out of her skull, but she shows Jess into Ty Johnson’s private room anyway. “He’s in an induced coma for now,” she says. “We pumped his stomach—sleeping pills in addition to everything else, it was a nightmare—and gave him what drugs we could to try and counteract whatever’s in his system, but the lab is still finding new shit in his blood stream. He’s flatlined three times since they brought him in, and there’s something going on with his muscular response system that’s freaking the hell out of his supervising physicians. I’m really not sure if he’s ever going to wake up.”

Jess can’t really look at Ty for too long. He looks a little better than he did in the warehouse, but God, Jesus, he still looks like Luke. She’s not just saying that. The line of his jaw is the same as Luke’s, the angle of his nose. His hair’s growing out, and he’s way skinner than Luke has probably ever been, not just because of lifestyle but in build and bone and muscle, so it’s not exactly the same, but still. They could be brothers, and not from a distance, either. She knows she’s not imagining it. “If he does wake up—”

“Call you,” says Claire, and Jess nods. “Fine. I have no idea why you’re interested in this kid. But fine, if you want.”

“Part of a case.”

Claire frowns. “For who?”

Jess just looks at her for a moment. “I thought you said you had friends like me.”

Claire blinks at her once or twice. Then she rolls her eyes to the ceiling again, and mutters, “ _Christ._ ” It’s really the only way anyone sane will respond, so Jess doesn’t take it too personally. “When the hell did you three get chummy?”

“You’ll have to ask them that, you probably see them more than I do.” Jess shoves her hands in her pockets. “Let me know if anything changes.”

“Can do,” says Claire. “Now get the fuck out of my workplace.”

Jessica gets the fuck out.

She supposes she only has Trish to thank when she doesn’t wake up until 2pm the next day. Malcolm’s nowhere to be seen, though there’s a note on her coffee pot (and it’s been programmed to 1:30, so it’s still hot, God, she really is that predictable) that says he’s going to go and ask around about other kids going missing, call when she gets up. Jess doesn’t call. She drops down into the chair behind her desk in her underwear and tank top, adds booze to her coffee, and then stares out the window for a while trying to think.

If the Maggia is testing a drug on human subjects, and the human subjects ( _kids,_ she thinks, and there’s a flash of the girl in the alley again, needles in her eyes and blood on her skirt, _they’re testing it on kids—_ ) keep on dying because of whatever the Maggia are giving them, then what the hell are they trying to do? A new drug, maybe. She hasn’t heard anything about any new blow or blow-ripoff on the streets, nothing about anything that kills like this. And they haven’t tested it on adults, only on kids, so why kids?

 _Easier to hide_ , she thinks, and drinks half her coffee in one go. Jess adds more whiskey to it without looking at the bottle. _Easier to kill if it comes down to it._

But kids also have more people looking for them. Yeah, sure, a lot of runaways are never asked after, never want to go back home, but when kids disappear, no matter who they are or where they go, people tend to notice. Taking only kids could send a very bad message. So why risk getting police attention? Why not just take anyone off the street?

_Kids are still growing._

But what could that have to do with the drugs?

_Maybe it can only work properly on someone that's not a full adult yet._

But that wouldn't make sense, not with Tandy and Ty in their late teens.

_Most people don't stop growing until they're twenty or twenty-three._

Why kids, though?

_You'd need a breakdown of the drug for that one._

But that’s not going to happen, not if Ty dies. Shit, she should have asked Claire when she was in Metro-General. Jess pulls her legs up against her chest, and curls into her chair, staring out the window. There’s a pigeon on her fire escape. If she tips her head just right, she can see the smear of adhesive from the envelope Lilith had taped to the window.

“If you have so goddamn much on this guy,” she says to the pigeon, “then why the fuck do you want me in on this at all?”

The pigeon takes a shit, and flies off.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Jess says, and crawls back into bed to stare at her computer for a while, and bitch at the YMCA when they refuse to tell her anything. The doctor Lantom mentioned, the one that had bothered Tandy, he probably won't show up until dark anyway. It's when all the best predators do their hunting.

Trish shows up at six with a dress that for once doesn’t make Jess want to hurl (it’s shortish and black and there aren’t any frills on it, which makes it a damn sight better than anything Dorothy would ever have picked). She takes one look at Jess in the bed, and then says, “Go shower.”

“What?”

“Go shower. When was the last time you showered?”

“Yesterday, asshat.”

“Yeah, well, do it again.” She snaps out the dress and lays it on the end of the bed. “Also, I’m going to try and cover up most of the bruises, but you’re gonna have to sit still.”

“Please, God, kill me now,” Jess says, but she heaves herself out of bed and into the shower anyway, because her feet are cold.

It’s half past seven by the time they finally get to The Plaza, and Jess is coming out in hives thanks to all the makeup that’s been slathered over her face (they had to leave tape on her broken nose, but the bruises are covered, anyway; they’ve already yellowed and soured and faded more than Jess anticipated). Trish fiddles with the fringe on her shawl, picking at her fingernails. She’s had them done sometime in the past sixteen hours, and they’re almost too shiny. “Quit doing that,” Jess says, as they clamber out of the cab (Trish pays, which Jess has no problem with, because Jess would rather not be here at all. Breaking into a Maggia McMansion sounds like a much better idea at this point). “It’s gross.”

“Thanks,” says Trish sourly, but she stops. “You know what he looks like, right?”

“No, I’ve been staring at his photo for the past few hours for nothing. Of course I know what he looks like, give me some credit.” She scowls. “You’re jumping around like you have ants in your panties, quit it.”

“That’s so helpful, Jess, thanks.”

“I told you I can’t do that making you feel better shit. Don’t make me feel like I have to.”

Trish loops her arm through Jess’s, and sighs. “Please, God, let there be an open bar.”

Jess has been in the ballroom at The Plaza before, a long time ago for an event after It’s Patsy won some award or something. It’s about the same kind of stifling opulence as it was back then, all gold and shiny and with fondue fountains of cheese that make her stomach curdle. Trish keeps her arm looped through Jessica’s, though Jess is pretty sure it’s to keep her from disappearing more than anything else, and starts schmoozing while Jess steals champagne flutes off of passing trays and pretends that she knows what the fuck anyone is talking about. Thankfully, nobody asks after her once they hear the _oh, Jess was in a car accident and that’s why her nose is broken_ story. It’s like they think if they talk to her she’ll spit blood on them or something. (With one or two of these women, she’s thinking about it, though, let’s be honest.) They go through two full tours of the room and schlep for like…an hour before she finally nails down that Silvio Manfredi isn’t actually here yet.

“You’re sure he’s coming,” Jess says, and Trish looks down at her phone again. She’s been texting all night, tapping away with her fingernails while her other hand stays linked firmly through Jessica’s.

“Yes, I’m sure he’s coming. You asked that five minutes ago and the answer was the same.”

“He could have ditched.”

“I asked the announcer. Manfredi wants to give a little speech. He should be here soon. Quit worrying, you’re making me anxious.”

“ _I’m_ making _you_ anxious,” Jess says, and Trish has opened her mouth to argue with her when someone makes a startled, happy sound.

“Trish,” says a voice, and for the first time all night Trish actually smiles like she means it. “Trish Walker, you stupid bitch, where the hell have you been for three months?”

“What the fuck,” Jess says, and nearly hisses. “Who the fucking hell—”

“It’s okay.” Trish pinches Jess’s forearm, just lightly enough that it doesn’t sting. “That’s just Kate. She’s always like that.”

“Always an asshole, you mean?”

Trish turns, drops her voice so Jess has to lean in to hear her. “Coming from you, that’s hilarious.”

“Don’t you fucking start with me.”

“Kate,” Trish calls, and a girl in a slinky purple gown and long gloves materializes out of the crowd. She’s Asian, Jess is pretty sure, but her eyes are a raw, startling blue. Her earrings dangle in chains of silver down against her throat. “Kate, this is Jessica Jones. You’ve been asking about her.”

_She’s been doing what now._

“Jess, meet Kate Bishop; her dad is one of the donors I’m supposed to be courting for the next major fundraiser through _TrishTalk_ , but Kate’s much easier to deal with.”

“I’m a cheap date,” says the kid. She looks about nineteen or twenty, maybe a year or two younger than Malcolm. (Speaking of: Jess digs her phone out from where she’s hidden it, in the stupid little purse that Trish had insisted she use, and taps out, _Any news?_ ) She sticks out her hand. “My dad will call me Katherine, but if you do it I’ll shoot you in the foot.”

“You have a gun on you at a fundraiser?”

“I have throwing knives,” says Kate, her mouth curling into a comma shape. “And the guards around the walls have guns. They’re stupidly easy to steal from.”

That’s…heartening. Jessica glares into the champagne glass Trish hands her, and contemplates sneaking to the open bar to get something stronger.

“So,” says Kate. She steals Jess’s champagne flute, and toasts her with it. Jess watches it go with a mournful sort of feeling that says bad things about how desperate she’s getting for an actual fucking drink. “Trish told me you’re a private detective. Any cool new cases?”

Jess scoffs. “I don’t talk about open cases.”

“Not even to the people paying you?” says Kate, and Jess freezes with her phone halfway back in the purse. She’s smirking. When she hands Jess her glass back, there’s a touch of purple lipstick on the rim. “They didn’t tell you, did they?”

“Who didn’t tell me what?”

“Nelson, Murdock and Lewis didn’t tell you who you were working for.” She tips her head, and yeah, that exact motion, that’s something Lewis was doing, and _shitfuckshithell_. “I’m kinda surprised you didn’t go looking further into it before now.”

“I’ve been distracted.”

“Looking into Ty or looking into Tandy?”

Trish’s eyes pop a little. “How on earth do you know those two?”

“Ask me no secrets,” says Kate, and Jess looks at her from top to toe again, trying to remember Lilith’s proportions. It had been dark, but she’s fairly sure that Lilith had been both shorter and curvier than Kate Bishop is. Still, there’s something about the curl to her lips and the way her eyebrows have gone up that’s oddly familiar. “In other words, I have people everywhere, and one of them told me she thought this kid was gonna be charged for something he didn’t do. I know the lawyers a little bit, and so when I contacted them about maybe getting someone to look into it, they suggested you. I told them to go to town.”

“They were the ones who—” Trish looks at Jess, then at Kate again. “When you had the civil suit.”

“Yeah, same people.” Kate flicks a hand. “They’re cool. Kinda dumb sometimes about certain things, but I like them.” She says it completely casually, but when she glances at Jess again, her eyes have gone all sharp. It’s a look that says _fuck them over and I’ll kill you slowly_. Trish slips her hand back into the crook of Jess’s elbow, and Jess presses it close to her side in spite of herself. She knows that look, way too well. “They give you everything you need?”

“They didn’t have much.”

“They don’t know Ty at all, so they wouldn’t.”

“How do you know him, again?”

“Like I said, ask me no questions.” Kate looks down at her wrist, at the completely indelicate watch that she’s wearing, and frowns. “He’s been AWOL for twenty minutes. I should probably go look for him.”

“Look for who?”

“Clint.” She goes up on her tiptoes (which is pretty impressive, considering she’s fairly tall already, and she’s in crazy-high heels) and peers over the heads of the crowd. “He’s not my date, before you ask. I dragged him along because it’d piss him off. And because it’d make my dad angry.”

“Please tell me you didn’t bring a gangbanger to a women’s health fundraiser,” says Trish, more amused than anything.

“I didn’t bring a gangbanger to a women’s health fundraiser,” says Kate. “I brought a carnival reject. He’s probably hiding somewhere because my dad makes awful angry faces and he’s a goddamn baby when it comes to angry daddies.”

“Sounds like it didn’t work out too well, then.”

“Oh, it definitely worked out. My dad’s pissed, Clint’s grumpy, and the whole thing is just really fucking funny. I just need to keep him from climbing into the rafters to escape the hordes.”

There aren’t any rafters in the ballroom, but Jess very kindly does not point this out.

"You sure he's even still here? If he's scared of your dad he might have ditched."

"I know where he lives, he knows better than that." Kate drops back down onto her feet again. “I’ll see you ladies later. If you see someone in a purple tie and he looks like he just rolled out of a dumpster, tell him to come find me.”

“Can do,” says Trish, and Kate salutes before vanishing back into the crowd. For a long moment, Jess can’t say anything at all.

“Just let it pass,” Trish says, and drags her towards the bar. “She’s always like that. Just let it pass.”

“I _work_ for her.”

“Apparently you do. So you need to just let it wash over you and let it go.”

Jess kind of wants to sit down and put her head between her knees.

“C’mon,” says Trish. “I think there are some empty seats over there.”

“I hafta piss,” says Jess. She pulls away. “I’ll find you later.”

“Don’t go sniffing around,” says Trish, but she lets her go.

Jessica doesn’t go sniffing around. She hides in the bathroom for a few minutes, blocking the door with a heavy armchair (because there are armchairs in the restrooms at The Plaza, it’s fucking ridiculous) and staring at herself in the mirror long enough that her eyes start to hurt. She looks like a fucking wreck, even by her own standards. “What the hell are you doing here,” she says to her reflection, and then turns on the sink. The water’s frigid on her bruised knuckles. “Manfredi’s not showing up and you know it.”

There’s a choked off sound from one of the stalls. Jess whips around, hand raised (she sprays water fucking everywhere, but whatever, she’s jumpy, okay) but no one’s standing behind her. None of the stalls are being used, either, though the one at the end—that one’s shut. When she looks down, there are two very masculine shoes peeking out from underneath the stall door.

 _You have to be fucking shitting me._ Jess rolls her eyes, and raises her voice. “If there’s a hobo in a purple tie in there, Kate’s looking for you, and she’s getting pissed.”

There’s a moment of absolute ringing silence. Then, quietly: “Thanks,” says Clint, whoever the hell he is. “Why are you looking for Silvio Manfredi?”

“He knocked me up and now I want to take him for all he has, the fucking bastard,” says Jess. “Go find your fucking date before she hurts someone.”

Clint stifles a noise that sounds rather like a squawk. “She’s not my date. She’s like…two.”

“I don’t fucking care. She’s just acting like a crazy person.”

“So she’s being herself.”

She can’t actually roll her eyes any harder, she doesn’t think. “I have no fucking clue. Hiding in the women’s bathroom is kind of ridiculous, though, man. Just saying.”

He shifts around, awkwardly. “I’ll…go find her, I guess.”

“Whatever,” says Jess. She kicks the armchair aside, and lets the bathroom door swing shut behind her. She doesn’t turn off the sink.

Trish is a fucking angel in human form, because by the time Jess comes back, she’s mixed a drink that’s actually decent booze, and comes close to the right color of _fuck me up and knock me out_ that makes her feel better. In her purse, her phone buzzes. Trish has turned to nursing her own (much lighter and probably less powerful, though no less girly) beverage of choice by the time Jess actually notices, and it takes her a lot longer than she wants to admit to get the thing out of the little clutch. (The chain of the purse snaps off in her hand, and shit, that’s…a lot of money that Trish isn’t going to get back.) _Malcolm: five more names. We’re gonna keep looking._

She frowns. _We?_

_Kid from the law firm wanted to help._

Santino? (He’d dressed like a street kid, moved like a street kid. He’d been too clean, but he’d definitely moved like a street kid, and the look on his face—Christ. He and Malcolm together would be a guilt train that would crush her into tiny bits.) _Don’t be stupid._

 _Coming from you, that’s adorable,_ says Malcolm, and seriously, do Trish and Malcolm just—get together and braid each other’s hair and bitch about how much of an asshole Jess can be? Because that’s seriously what it sounds like right now.

There’s a buzz of reverb from a microphone, and she freezes. At the front, the stand has mostly been empty (there was one woman at the beginning of the night who declared the fundraiser open donation and to _write checks as you see fit, ladies and gentlemen,_ which Jess honestly thinks is kind of gross, but whatever). Now, though, there’s a small, grey-haired man standing on the stage, in a trim black suit and shining shoes. He has a faint accent that might be Italian.

“Good evening, everyone,” he says. By the bar, Jess sees Trish turn, and lift her chin in the _caught you_ look. “And how lovely it is to see you all after my long time away.”

He has grey eyes, Jess thinks. He’s too far away for her to make them out properly, but in the photos, his eyes had looked grey. The expression on his face, though, Christ. He's smiling, but there's something cold behind it that makes the hair along her spine stand up and do an odd little jig. She shuts her eyes, just for a moment. There's no proof, she tells herself. There's no real proof that Manfredi is the one messing around with the drugs. But Christ, _Christ—_

( _Do me a favor, Jess, and—_ )

 _You,_ Jess thinks, and gets to her feet. In her hand, Malcolm sends another text. She doesn’t look at it. _I’m onto you, asshole._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jess is just so constantly exhausted by everything and I identify with this way too much. 
> 
> No triggers that haven't already been mentioned in other chapters, other than PTSD flashback stuff for things that happened in _Jessica Jones_.
> 
> I will have the final one up in a few days; I'm planning on getting this done before the 18th. (NEW! SEASON! OF DAREDEVIL! SCREAMING!)
> 
> Forgot to mention: Mattie Franklin is a 616 character. She's one of the Spider-Women. She shows up in the _Jessica Jones_ comics.

It’s about one in the morning when they finally get back from the fundraiser, and Jess is pretty sure she’s never going to get the cigarette smoke out of her hair. (Christ, why did she quit smoking? Smoking helped. Smoking _worked_. But she’d kicked it because it stank. She doesn’t regret it most of the time—spontaneous human combustion is a thing, and though she can survive a lot, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t make it out of a whiskey-fuelled inferno—but God, sometimes the smell makes her want to cry.)

“I still think we should have talked to him.”

“That would have been a bad idea in so many ways, Trish, seriously.” Jess pulls the pins from her hair—thank fucking Christ, they’ve been pinching at her scalp for hours—and throws them onto the desk. One of them rolls all the way off the other side, and disappears into a dust bunny. “Shit. If he’s really the one that’s been having those kids grabbed, then I’d rather stay off his radar until we have more of an idea of what’s going on.”

“What about all the evidence on the drive, wouldn’t that be enough to confront him?”

“Most of it’s circumstantial. Not that I care, that’s a lawyer’s job, but my job’s to gather evidence that Ty Johnson didn’t do this to himself. If Manfredi thinks someone’s looking into it, he’ll just do a clean sweep and that means Johnson’s probably gonna end up in jail.”

“If he doesn’t end up dead along with Tandy.” Trish unhooks the combs from her hair, shakes it down her back. She scrapes at her scalp with her fingernails. “Have you heard anything from the hospital?”

“Claire said she’d call if anything changed.”

Trish leaves her filmy shawl thing on the edge of the desk. “So we’re seriously thinking that Silvio Manfredi, who’s known all over the city as like…a majorly philanthropic entrepreneur, is having homeless children taken off the street and injected with some kind of overpowered mutant growth hormone cocktail?”

“Bigger names have done worse,” says Jess. “Look at Tony Stark.”

“It’s just kind of intense.” Trish lets out a hissing breath. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Jess.”

“I don’t get why you’re asking.” She scowls. “If this is about me getting shot at again—”

“Jess, come on.” Trish puts a hand on her hip. “Teenagers being experimented on with strange substances, probably for the purpose of them getting special powers? You sure this isn’t hitting just a little too close to home for you?”

Jess blinks. Then she blinks again. “…huh.”

“…you didn’t even think of that part, did you.”

No, because if she’s honest she’d been more worried about Trish’s reaction to the whole thing with Tandy Bowen. She clears her throat. “Would you believe me if I said that I don’t really care?”

“No.”

“Your loss.” She twists around with her good arm to fumble with the zipper. “You should go home. It’s late.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Columbia.” The dress falls into a puddle at her feet. Jess marches into the bedroom to find her jeans. The bandage on the bullet crease will need to be changed soon, but for now, she just pulls a shirt over her head. “You’re not coming this time, Trish.”

“But—”

“You remember at Midtown Science where people could always pick you out of a lineup no matter how shitty you looked that day?” Her jeans have something on them. Blood, maybe. She picks at the stain with her fingernail, and then buttons them up. “You smell rich. It’s obnoxious.”

“I do not.”

“You _do_ , and it scares off street kids. You need to stay here.”

Trish’s heels click over the floor. “You really think the guy Tandy was talking about had anything to do with this?”

Jess turns, and stops. Trish has one arm braced against the door frame, backlit by the desk lamp. Her hair looks like sunlight, Jess thinks. Different shades of sunlight. It’s distracting. She clears her throat.

“I think he sounds like bait.” She pulls her hair out from underneath her collar. “That or a pusher. Gets the kids interested, gets them worked up, funnels them right into Manfredi’s men. But I won’t be able to tell which one he is unless you stay here. The kids would never talk to me with a prom queen hanging over my shoulder.”

“I wasn’t made prom queen,” says Trish, like this is offensive.

“No, but that’s only because you rejected the title. Half the school voted for you and you didn’t even run.”

Trish can’t argue with that. “Seriously. Jess, at least take Malcolm.”

“You see him here? He’s either asleep or still out with that law firm kid. Either way, Q-Tip is unavailable for the night.” Besides, she’d rather not drag Malcolm along to interrogate a guy who might possibly turn out to be a drug dealer. (The guy probably is a drug dealer, who is she kidding? A drug dealer or an accessory to kidnap or both, and either way, Malcolm’s just on the edge of the age range they’re looking for. She doesn’t want him brought to the attention of Manfredi’s men.)

( _Little hard_ , a voice in the back of her head says, _when he’s already out looking for other missing kids._ )

( _Yeah, well…fuck you._ )

Trish still has that pinched, constipated-as-fuck worried look on her face. Jess zips up her jacket rather than look at it. “I’ll be back by dawn.”

“Fine,” Trish says. “I’ll wait here for you.”

“Go home, Trish.”

“You still have that caramel coffee flavoring from Starbucks I gave you for your birthday, right?” Trish says, and fucks off to go steal it. Jess slams back out the door, shoulders hitching up around her ears when the glass inlay rattles a warning. It doesn’t break, though. No cracks, even. _Take that, suckers._

Usually you don’t see a lot of homeless around Columbia in the daytime, mostly because the rich college students scare them off, but at night it’s a little different. Jess keeps her eyes on the pavement, mostly, but at the edge of her vision she keeps catching flickers of movement from alleys. Not all of them are kids, but a lot of them are. Teenagers blend better with other teenagers, and sitting near where the freshmen dick around is generally a pretty good way to keep cops from nagging you too much. She passes back and forth in front of one of the busier alleys, and then stares out at the road, clearing her throat. “I’m not a cop,” she says, loudly. There’s a rustle from behind a dumpster. “Just wanna talk to someone about Ty Johnson. Or Tandy Bowen, if anyone here knows either of ‘em.”

Down at the other end of the alley, a few kids break off from the group, and vanish deeper into the mess of the university.

“Or you can fuck off,” Jess says, almost inaudible. “You know, that’s fine too.”

“It’d help if you hadn’t come around that first time with the social worker,” says a voice. There’s a girl (seventeen? Maybe? Jess is bad with ages, especially with kids), some kind of Latina, Jess is pretty sure, standing by one of the cafes a little ways down the block. Her hair’s chopped short in a way that’s utilitarian, rather than intentional, and there’s a scar on her cheek, pocked like a cigarette burn. It could be dirt making that shadow on her throat, but it could also be a bruise. She frowns. “Scares ‘em.”

“She wasn’t a social worker,” says Jess. “She’s just a dumbass who doesn’t know how the world works sometimes.”

The kid blinks at her, and makes a wheezy sound that could be a laugh. “You’re fucking weird, for a cop.”

“Jesus. Does nobody hear me when I say things? Do I look like a fucking cop?”

The kid gestures. “Leather jacket.”

“Bite me, this was my dad’s.”

She blinks. “Your dad as much of a midget as you?”

“Yeah, fuck you.” This kid looks about six months short of food, even with the wiry _I’ll fuck you up if you come near me_ tension hanging around her mouth. Jess shoves her hands into her pockets, and then draws them back out again when the girl flinches away, jerking like she thinks Jess is gonna draw a gun. “Fine. You wanna see ID? I can show you ID.”

The girl purses her lips. “Give it.”

Jess digs her wallet out of her jeans pocket, and offers it to the girl. After all, if she tries to bolt with it, Jess can always catch up and bean her in the head with one fist, that’s not difficult. The girl takes it, and pages through the little plastic folder thingy of cards before handing it back. She doesn’t even try to sneak money out of it. “PI?”

“That’s what they call me.”

“Thought those were like…Sam Spade novels.”

“We exist,” says Jess. “What’s your name?”

“Mattie.”

“You have a last name?”

Mattie’s mouth goes thin. “You gonna tell a cop?”

“Fuck no,” says Jess. “I’m not here to throw your ass in jail for being a runaway or whatever, Mattie. Just trying to be friendly.”

Mattie pushes her hair back up out of her face. She’s very sharp boned, but her mouth’s an actual cupid’s bow, and Jess was pretty sure that that kind of description was just bullshit before this moment. Like, actual cupid’s bow mouth. It’s kind of scary looking to be completely honest. “Franklin,” she says. “M’name’s Mattie Franklin.”

“And look at that, the world didn’t fucking explode.” Jess shoves her hands into her pockets. “You know Tandy Bowen?”

“I mean, as much as I know anyone who used to sleep under the next bench over in Central Park.” Mattie shrugs. “I know Ty a little better. Used to go to the same shelter before he met up with Tandy a few years ago.”

Jess purses her lips a little.

“What happened to your face?” says Mattie curiously. “Bad boyfriend?”

“Guys tend not to like me too much,” says Jess. “How long have they been homeless? Tandy and Ty.”

“I don’t know.”

“As long as you?”

Mattie snorts. “Thought you were here to talk about them.”

And that’s a cue if she ever heard one. Jess ignores it. “What happened to _your_ face?”

“My dad didn’t like me,” says Mattie. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right? Poor me. My daddy didn’t like that I like girls and so he burned my poor kid face and threw me out. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

“Dude, I don’t fucking know,” says Jess. “’s your life, not mine. Just looks like it hurt, whatever happened.”

“Definitely the best day ever,” says Mattie. “They haven’t been out here as long as me, no. Ty’s from Jersey, I think. Some of the native city kids used to make fun of him a lot ‘cause he stutters, and he’s from Jersey. Newark, I think. Tandy…who knows. She’s definitely not from around here.”

She says it like _Tandy’s not from the same dimension_ instead of _Tandy’s not from New York City_.

“Ty’s in the hospital,” Jess says. “Overdosed.”

“Ty? Bullshit.” Mattie spits onto the sidewalk. “Ty didn’t go anywhere near drugs. Said they killed his best friend. Wouldn’t touch ‘em. Wouldn’t spend any time near kids who did. People didn’t like him much in the shelters, thought he was prissy.”

“But Tandy didn’t?”

“People thought Tandy spent time with Ty because he’s tall and black and intimidating looking from a distance, but yeah, no. Tandy and Ty are close. I dunno if they’re like…screwing or have some kind of weird brother-sister thing going on or whatever, but you never see one without the other.” Mattie shrugs. “If Ty OD’ed, then Tandy’d be raining hell down on whoever made him do it.”

“So you do think someone would have made him do it?” Jess says, and Mattie’s mouth thins. “Like who?”

Mattie pulls her hood up over her head, and yanks a box of cigarettes from her pocket. She has to click her lighter four times before the sparks finally catch. Jess watches her do it, hands in her pockets, and doesn’t wrinkle her nose when Mattie blows smoke in her face.

“I tell you shit like that, I wind up like those kids with needles in their eyeballs,” she says. “No thanks.”

“You don’t tell me, I beat the crap out of you and leave you for the crows.”

“Wow, friendly,” says Mattie. “You really aren’t a cop.”

“Because cops would be any friendlier.” Jess shoves her hands deeper into her pockets. “Heard somewhere there’s a guy who hangs around Columbia, talking to homeless kids. Someone said he was a doctor. You know him?”

“Bobby Karnelli, sure.” Mattie taps ash off the end of her cigarette. “Sure as hell not a doctor, though. He’s with one of those church groups, not—not community service like Tandy and Ty are now, it’s one of those groups that runs like…recalibration camps for kids whose parents don’t want them to be gay or whatever. I think they’re called like…the Youth Hostel of the New Testament or something. They used to send a woman down here, but it’s been Bobby Karnelli the past few months or so.”

“You ever talk to him?”

“Mostly he only talks to the pretty girls,” says Mattie, and taps at her cigarette again. “I wear a hood for a reason. He’s damn good at picking out the younger ones, though.”

“He ever talk to Tandy?”

“Not that I saw, but I wouldn’t be surprised. She came down here sometimes with volunteers from that church out in Chelsea, St. Patrick’s or St. Finnigan’s or whatever the fuck Irish Catholic thing it is.” Mattie frowns. “At least they don’t keep lecturing. They used to. Tandy made them stop.”

Tandy’s starting to sound like a little saint. It’s getting on Jess’s nerves. “What’s he like? Bobby Karnelli.”

“Other than gross?” She shrugs. “I dunno. Like I said, never talked to him. He hands out pamphlets, tells kids they’ll get food and a place to sleep if they just listen to his bullshit for an hour or so.”

“You ever see anyone take him up on it?”

“Yeah, a few.”

“Those ones have names?”

Mattie looks at Jess through her eyelashes for a moment. “Sarah,” she says. “Sarah Wiggins. Riley, didn’t know his last name. Then the one obsessed with fairy tales, um. The Matchstick Girl.”

“She just went by The Matchstick,” Jess says. “I knew her. She’s dead.”

Mattie closes her eyes. She lets out a breath. “Nice kid,” she says, finally. “She’d tell stories to the crazy ones, keep ‘em quieter when the cops came to clear us out of alleyways. Made things easier.”

Jess eyes her. Then she says, “You’d’ve come to talk to me even if I’d never tried to get answers out of you people, wouldn’t you.”

“We talked about it,” Mattie says. She exhales more smoke. “Figured one of us should say something, and now Ty’s…wherever he is, I’m the oldest.”

“Oldest of whom?”

She shuts her mouth up tight again.

“Ty’s in Metro-General Hospital,” says Jess. “For the record. You think Bobby Karnelli’s the one killing these kids?”

“Nah, he’s a suck-up.”

“Suck-ups can kill,” says Jessica. “Anyone can kill.”

“He’d keep his hands out of it,” Mattie says. “Tries to keep his nails clean. Not all the kids he gets to turn up dead.”

“Just most of them.”

Mattie takes another drag of her cigarette.

“What’s he look like?” Jess says. “Bobby Karnelli.”

“Big.” Mattie scuffs her hand through the air at about six inches over her head, and she’s already five eleven, probably. “Bulky. Looks kinda like a circus strongman but with a less broken face. Red hair, lots of freckles. Dresses nice, but he doesn’t wear it too well, I don’t think he’s used to ties. He’s always messing with the thing.” She considers. “He carries a leather notebook thing, for his flyers.”

And there could be any number of reasons for that, but to Jess, _big and bulky and uncomfortable in suits_ usually means _dressed up muscle_. “He have a schedule?”

“Not really. He shows up during the day, mostly, but I’ve seen him at midnight too. Depends on the weather.”

“See him today?”

“Nah.” Her cigarette’s almost down to a stump. Mattie still puts it to her lips one last time, until the sparks flare far too close to her fingers, before dropping it and scraping it out underneath her tennis shoe. There’s a hole in the side of the old Converse, and one of the toes is patched with duct tape. “He’ll probably show tomorrow morning, though. There’s a string quartet from the university doing a project for one of their music classes, Art on the Streets or something. They set up there, across from the Starbucks. He’s usually around to watch them. Think he likes having an accompaniment to saving our souls or whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.”

Jess scuffs her boot over the pavement. “You think he’ll show tonight?”

“Nah. It rained.” She shrugs. “He doesn’t like getting his shoes wet.”

What a prissy little bastard. “You have a phone?”

Mattie’s eyes turn to slits. “No.”

So, she does, and she’s probably stolen it. Jess fumbles a blank card out of her pocket, and scrawls her cell on the back. “You see him tonight, call me,” she says. “You’ll get paid.”

“Don’t want money for this,” Mattie says, and snatches the card out of her hand like it’s a bomb. “Don’t need it, anyway.”

Jess pointedly doesn’t look at her shoes. “God forbid I have to give money to someone who doesn’t want it.”

She snorts, and shoves the card into her bra. “Whatever, PI.”

“Just in case you can’t find a phone—” Mattie doesn’t meet her eyes “—talk to Reynardine out in Hell’s Kitchen, he knows where to find me.”

“Pretty sure everyone knows where to find you, Jessica Jones,” says Mattie, and salutes before vanishing back into the alley. Jess scowls.

“That’s not encouraging,” she snaps into the dark. Mattie laughs, and vanishes.

.

.

.

Trish is already asleep when Jess gets back, and there’s no point in waking her, so Jess settles in her desk chair and tries to go through more of what Lilith left for her on the fire escape. It doesn’t work out too well, though. She’s not sure if it’s the all-nighter, or if she’s still tired from whatever healing bullshit is going on under the bandages, or if she’s had too much to drink or whatever, but she shuts her eyes at about four in the morning ( _—just for a second, and then—_ ) and then all of a sudden it’s way too fucking bright, her neck hurts like a motherfucker, and her phone is pressed into her cheek and vibrating like a fucking massage machine of death. Jess sits up too fast— _fuck_ , her nose hates her—and whacks at the accept call button, nearly cracking the screen. “The fuck— _what_.”

“Oh,” says Lewis. Jessica can practically feel the smirk curling around the edges of her stupid lawyer mouth. “Did I wake you, Jessica Jones?”

“Is there a reason why you’re calling?”

A taxi blares on Lewis’s end of the line. It drowns her out for a second or two, sets gongs ringing in Jessica’s head. _Fuck_. Too early for this shit. Nine o’clock in the morning, Jesus fucking Christ. “—wondering if you’d found anything.”

“Say that again, but like…with fewer foghorns.”

“And so the trumpets sound,” says Lewis. “Just wanted to check up on where you were with Ty Johnson.”

“Working on it.”

“Nothing at all you can tell me right off the bat?” Lewis says, lightly, but there’s…something. It’s not odd, exactly. More coiled. “Only I can’t get this charge thrown out until I have evidence to support me and I really would rather not have to spend more time on this than I have to.”

“I get how the whole court thing works,” says Jess. She presses her fingers into her eyes. She’s not going to fall back to sleep, not with a blue jay in her ear and a pounding goddamn headache. When she looks into the bedroom, it’s empty. Trish must have wandered off somewhere. She heads for the bathroom instead. “I’ll call you when I have something.”

“I’ll wait with baited breath.” There’s a burst of voices. In Jess’s kitchen, something clatters. Then Lewis says: “I heard from Kate that you two crossed paths.”

Christ. Jess stares at herself in the mirror for a second—still bruised, still with a broken nose, still shitty—and then says, “Does she tell you everything that goes on at those parties? Because her boyfriend was hiding in the women’s bathroom.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.” Lewis hums something under her breath that sounds like the Looney Tunes _th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks accompaniment_. “Tick-tock, Jones. The charges have already been filed, I want them dropped before Ty wakes up to find himself cuffed to the bed.”

“He wasn’t cuffed when I was there.”

“Yeah, well, he’s cuffed now, because apparently he’s such a flight risk.” Lewis scoffs. “Racist bastards. Seriously. Clock’s ticking.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Jess, and hangs up before Lewis can do it first. “Obnoxious bitch.”

“Who was that?” Trish says, and Jess snags one of her hoodies out from under the bed before ducking out into the office again. Trish is dressed, apparently, terrifyingly business-like as she taps through her cell phone with her fingernails. Jess can’t remember Trish bringing clothes with her, but who knows. Sometimes it seems like Trish is actually a scarier Mary Poppins. Except more control freak. “One of the lawyers?”

“Lewis is crazy.”

“I kinda want to meet her if she pisses you off this much.”

“Fuck you,” Jess says, and peers at the screen of Trish’s phone. She’s googling Manfredi. “What’ve you learned?”

“Not much, since a lot of it’s on lockdown. Wouldn’t be surprised if Manfredi has people watching his internet image a la Wilson Fisk.” She swipes another window away. “Related to a Joseph Manfredi out in LA in the forties. Looks like Silvio’s either his son or his nephew or something, it’s unclear. Claims to have moved here from Italy when he was about twenty years old. Has a son named after his famous gangster dad and/or uncle, but he’s going to school in some foreign country with no US extradition agreement, which is…ominous.”

“I don’t really care about a kid that’s not even in the country right now, Trish.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Trish blows hair out of her eyes. “Anyway, inherited a lot of money from his dad and/or uncle. Moved to the States in the seventies, blah, went to school here, blah, set himself up as an entrepreneur. Business stuff for the most part. He’s on a lot of boards, but he doesn’t seem to run any company of his own directly. Kind of keeps himself to himself from the look of it.”

“Where does he live while he’s in the States?”

“I don’t know, you think he’ll be listed in the Yellow Pages?”

Jess, halfway to the kitchen, stops to glare at Trish over her shoulder. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Pot, kettle, blah blah blah. There’s coffee in the pot and the caramel stuff on the counter. And cream. And bagels.”

“What the fuck—Trish, are you _nesting_?”

“I had to go home to get a change of clothes and I was hungry, bite me.” They’re good bagels, at least. Jess doesn’t bother shoving one in the toaster. She sticks it in her mouth, and wanders around making coffee. Trish keeps talking. “Anyway, I looked into Tandy Bowen’s mom, too. I have that friend of a friend who does a lot of fashion runway work, right? And she’s heard of Melissa Bowen. Apparently the woman’s kind of a bitch. Never knew she had a daughter, though.”

Jess stops, and takes the bagel out of her mouth. “Trish.”

“What?”

“Don’t get attached.”

Trish doesn’t say anything for a minute. “I’m not getting attached.”

“I’m telling you now, don’t do it. Trust me, it just—it just gives you a whole lot of shit to deal with in the aftermath.”

Silence from the main room again. Then: “Is that why you never talk about Hope?”

Jess tears the bagel in half, and throws part of it onto a plate. “Tell me more about Silvio Manfredi.”

“I mean, there’s not much more to say. He keeps to himself, and he’s been out of the country for ages until now. In Sicily. There was a little press release for one of the companies he’s on the board of, um…Silver and Brent.”

“Didn’t they collapse when Fisk went to jail?”

“Well, their financial office was like…completely devastated, and a lot of their upper management was found to have ties to Fisk and whatever organization he had going, but the company itself is still going. Kinda. Sorta. Like a sloth with only three limbs.”

Jess doesn’t bother to add caramel to the coffee. She stalks back into the office. “That’s not a lot of help to us. I’m supposed to be looking for stuff about Ty, not stuff about Silvio Manfredi.”

“I mean, anything could help.”

That’s true, but she also doesn’t want to get sidetracked with Lewis breathing down the back of her neck like a fucking harpy. “I’m going back out to Columbia today. Don’t get involved, Trish.”

“Jess—”

“Don’t do anything without talking to me first. Promise me.”

Trish lets out a breath through her nose. “At least let me talk to someone in the police department, see if they think Manfredi’s involved with anything.”

“Do you have a PI’s license? No. Stick to what you know. I’ll do what I do. Hopefully, this bastard from the Youth Hostel of the New Testament doesn’t keep me waiting more than a few hours.”

“Youth hostel?”

“Might be a front, I dunno.” She considers. “You could Google them too, if you wanted.”

Trish touches her phone to her lips. “…what if I contacted Ben Urich?”

“The reporter guy?”

“I mean, he might know something. It’s worth a shot.”

Jess flaps a hand. “Fine, talk to the reporter. Don’t give him anything about the investigation, don’t tell him I’m the one looking into it, don’t tell him who told me to look into it, and for God’s sake, don’t ask him anything about Tandy Bowen, Trish, seriously, if he gets it into his head that he could have a story here it would completely blow the investigation out of the water.”

“I’m not stupid, Jess.” It’s fond, though. Trish leans back in the chair. “Lemme know when you find this Karnelli guy.”

“I’ll Snapchat you and everything,” says Jess, and she ducks the wadded-up scarf that Trish throws at her as she goes.

The string quartet that Mattie mentioned isn’t here yet. Neither is Mattie; Jess buys a coffee from Starbucks (which, what the fuck, so fucking expensive, what the fuck, this is why she doesn’t buy from coffee chains) and drops onto a nearby bench, staring at the nearest lamp-post. The clouds overhead look like rain, and she’s going to be fucking pissed if she has to sit around waiting for some kind of twisted religious nutjob/mob guy to show up in the middle of a downpour. People keep looking at her and then looking away again, probably because of her nose. Her cheek has gone down, swelling-wise, but her nose is still bright fucking purple, and it will be for a few days more. _Accelerated healing doesn’t mean everything fixes itself in a day_ , she thinks, and blows air into the little sippy hole thing on the lid of her coffee. Her arm still hurts like a mofo from sleeping wrong.

Her phone rings about an hour into it. It’s Malcolm. “We have like…seven more names,” he says, right off the bat. “Santino went back to the law firm to let them know. Where are you?”

“I’m starting to think my date stood me up,” she says. “‘swhat you get with mobsters.”

“You’re going after the Maggia alone _again_?”

“Not the whole Maggia, just one guy who may possibly be Maggia. He’s alone, before you freak, I already had Trish on my case this morning.” Jess bites the inside of her cheek. “Check on her, will you? She said she was gonna talk to a reporter, and I trust her, but, you know. I don’t trust her.”

“You could call her yourself,” says Malcolm, in the _Jess, why are you shoving your awkward questions onto me voice_. “She listens to you.”

“Are you fucking kidding? No, she doesn’t. She just fucks off and does what she wants like she always has.”

Malcolm snorts. “Usually ends up working out for you.”

“Trying not to break a streak.” Then something clicks. “Since when did law firm kid become Santino to you?”

Malcolm’s quiet for a long, unnerving moment. Then he says, “I mean, seems rude not to call him by his name after wandering around alleys for like…seven hours.”

“Is that what you were doing all last night?”

“I smell like a sewer again,” says Malcolm. “I never smelled like sewers before I started working for you.”

“Bullshit. You never smelled yourself while you were using.” Jess swirls the dregs of her coffee, and leans into her bench again. “Please, God, tell me I don’t need to give you the safe gay sex talk.”

“What the _fuck_ , Jessica.” His voice cracks like a teenager’s. “That’s—I’m not _you_.”

“Yeah, well, my parents died before they gave me the birds and the bees talk. They kinda left it until late, I had to like…google periods and everything.”

“This is not information I want to know.”

“So I don’t need to tell you about STDs and how they are in fact transmittable through oral sex? Because—”

“ _Jesus Christ_ ,” says Malcolm, and hangs up on her. Which was the point, so she congratulates herself a little. Malcolm’s not stupid enough to get involved with someone who works for people she’s working for, and to be honest she’s not entirely sure how he swings anyway. Besides, now she at least has a sure-fire strategy to get him to leave her alone. She files that away for further reference, crushes the cup in one fist, and throws it into the garbage can.

“Didn’t think you’d come back,” says Mattie from behind her. Jess glances over her shoulder—Mattie’s hood is up, and her hands are shoved into her pockets—before turning to watch a group of students with cello cases set up across the street. _And…go_.

“I’m not that much of an asshole.” She looks up at the clouds again. “You probably shouldn’t be talking to me where Karnelli might see you.”

“He’s not here yet. Besides, like I said, he’s never taken a second look at me.” Mattie drops down onto the other end of the bench. “Who were you talking to?”

“Assistant.”

“You talk about gay sex with your assistant?”

“Only when he’s being annoying.”

Mattie snorts. “You’re weird as fuck, you know that?”

“Fuck you,” Jessica says. She rests her elbows on her knees, and wishes she’d remembered her camera. “You missing anybody new?”

“I don’t know. People don’t tell me things that fast.”

Jess gets the feeling that Mattie’s lying through her teeth, but there’s absolutely nothing she can learn about that, so she just shrugs. “Whatever.”

“That’s him, by the way,” Mattie says, looking at the lamp-post. “Heading into the Starbucks.”

Bobby Karnelli looks just like Mattie said he would, like a circus strongman without the broken face. His hair’s a mess of red curls, flaring out from his head like corkscrews, and the doorway’s almost too small for him as he wedges his way into the coffee shop. Jess glances sideways at Mattie, and jerks her head. “I’d get out of sight.”

“You gonna pull a gun on him or something?”

“Nah, I just wanna talk to him.” Preferably with her fist, but whatever. “Go away, Mattie Franklin. Not gonna be nice if you don’t.”

“You aren’t?” says Mattie. “Or he isn’t?”

Jess rolls her eyes hard enough to hurt. “Why am I surrounded by brats who don’t listen to a word I say?”

“Probably because you’re not the least bit intimidating-looking,” says Mattie. “You look like a fucking Irish pixie.”

“I’m not Irish.”

“Says you, _Jones_.”

“I could break you like a twig, Franklin,” says Jessica. “Seriously, fuck off.”

Mattie slouches away, whistling. She sets herself up at the top of an alley, lighting another cigarette and standing underneath a fire escape as the sky starts to spit rain (oh, for fuck’s sake) but at least she’s out of sight. On the other side of the street, the violist is tuning her instrument, making weird little noises with the strings. Jess hides her fists in the pocket of her hoodie, and waits.

It takes about ten minutes for Bobby Karnelli to come out of the Starbucks again, venti whatever-it-is in hand. His button-down is open, mostly, and the shirt underneath (a size too small for him, and it strains) reads _Church of the New Testament, Youth Hostel_. It looks officially printed, but there are print shops all over the city that will run off shirts. She hadn’t been able to find much about them on the internet last night, other than the fact that they’ve only been running a hostel for a year or so. New church. Which, she thinks, might be evidence that they’ve only come into play since Silvio Manfredi started making plans to come back to town. But.

She’s heaving herself to her feet when the street explodes. Well, not exactly—Jess had been here during the invasion, she knows what it’s like to have streets heave and wreck themselves under her feet, to have monsters throwing impossible bolts and ripping the world in two—but there’s a flash of light and a lot of fire and screaming, and Bobby Karnelli’s up against a wall, his coffee staining his T-shirt. There’s a slender figure standing in the street, in the scraps of asphalt from a hard landing, and smoke’s curling off her clothes.

“Bobby,” she says, in a voice like a thunderstorm. “Bobby Karnelli.”

“What the fuck,” says Bobby Karnelli. Mattie’s at Jess’s elbow in an instant, whispering. Jess can’t really hear what she’s saying. “Who the hell are you?”

“Don’t you remember me,” says the girl in the hoodie. “You said you liked my hair.”

“Shit,” says Jess, and pushes at Mattie with both hands. _MGH_ , she thinks, _boosted MGH, and most of them have died but if one of them survived it, if one of them actually survived, then_ — “Get down, get back—”

“Jones, what’s happening?”

“Get _down_ ,” Jess shouts, but there’s another bright flash of light, and she’s blinking spots out of her eyes. Mattie knuckles at her face, tears running down her cheeks. Her skin’s pink, like she’s sunburned.

“Jones—”

“You did this to me!” says the girl in the hoodie.

“No, kid—” Bobby Karnelli backs up a step, hands up. “No, Jesus, I didn’t—what the hell is wrong with your eyes—”

“ _You did this_!”

There’s a flash, a scream. A concussive burst of air. Jess seizes a lamp-post. Mattie’s knocked ass over teacup and lands hard on the asphalt. The hoodie’s gone, burned to pieces, smoking on the pavement. The girl— _Tandy_ , she thinks, open-mouthed, _holy shit, that’s Tandy fucking Bowen_ —is holding what looks like fire in her hands, something that’s fire but not quite, a scorching yellow that’s like too-bright sunlight. Bobby Karnelli’s on the ground, his coat scored and scorched. People are shouting, running. Someone—one of the boys from the string quartet, all dreads and nose-rings—is filming it on his cell phone. Jess seizes it, and crushes it in her fist. “Fuck off,” she says, and the kid bolts. She doesn’t feel bad about it.

“Holy shit,” says Bobby Karnelli. He’s scrambling backwards across the sidewalk. “Holy shit, don’t—don’t kill me, please don’t kill me—”

“What did you _do to me_?” Tandy Bowen shrieks, and it’s not a human scream, not really, not anymore. It’s something piercing and scraping and _tearing_ , like she’s ripping the air apart. Light bursts out of her hands again, skitters off like a Frisbee and slams into the Starbucks window. The thing shatters. “What did you _do_?”

“I didn’t do this!”

“Fuck me,” Jess says, and heaves a piece of broken asphalt off the street. People are bolting from their cars and running, screaming. “Oh my god, just—fuck me, fuck me, fuck me so hard right now—”

“You’re one of them!” More light ricochets away, peeling off her skin like the crack of a whip. It lashes a lamp post in two. “ _You turned me into this_!”

“Tandy!” Jess bellows, and she throws the rock as hard as she can between Tandy Bowen and Bobby Karnelli. It splits apart before it gets within three feet of them, halved by another blade of light, but Tandy whips around. Her eyes are bleeding gold, gleaming in her head like tiny suns, and there’s light trapped between her teeth. Her face goes a little slack at the sight of Jess, her lashes flickering.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she says, but it’s not quite the same voice anymore. It wavers a little more, cracks. Like a teenage girl’s, instead of a human meteor. “He had me kidnapped, he—he had me _tortured with this_ , he turned me into a monster, don’t try to stop me—”

“Do whatever you want to that bozo,” Jess says. “I don’t care. I just don’t think you wanna burn down Columbia in the process.”

Tandy’s eyes flare wide. When she looks around, the light dims a little. Bobby Karnelli starts to creep back, further away, but Jess stalks forward, seizes him by the scruff of the neck (and that in and of itself is like grabbing sparks, because his clothes are all burny and shit) and throws him into a wall. Tandy jumps when the guy’s nose breaks, when he lets out a shriek like a dying raccoon and slides down to the ground with one hand cupped over his bloody face. _Fuck me_ , Jess thinks, but shit, if she can keep Tandy’s attention on her and Bobby Karnelli then maybe other people can get out of the street okay, get out of the way, and fucking hell, why did Trish have to call her a hero? This is _bullshit_.

“I’m Jessica Jones,” she says. “I’ve been looking for you. You’re a huge pain in the ass to find, you know that?”

Not all of her clothes are burning, Jess realizes. Only some of them. Whether it’s intentional, or whether Tandy’s doing it instinctively, keeping herself from scoring right through her wife-beater and the stolen, too-large khakis (probably the former, considering the sucker of a lamp-post) at least Jess isn’t facing off with a naked Starfire wannabe in the middle of Columbia. _Fuck me, fuck Lilith and Daredevil, fuck Nelson, Murdock and Lewis, fuck the Maggia, fuck Silvio Manfredi, fuck literally everyone associated with this, just—fuck everything_. Tandy wets her lips, and her mouth gleams like molten gold. “What do you want with me?”

“Your friend’s in the hospital,” says Jess. “Ty? Trying to find you to help him, a little bit. He’s in a coma.”

This is…not the right thing to say. Tandy staggers back, and flares. Jessica’s blinking sunspots away from her eyes when Tandy says “No” in a way that sounds more like a car accident than a human voice. “Oh, God, no.”

“Just—I have some questions for you, Tandy, okay, so can you like—tone down the glowy bits?”

“They did to him what they did to me,” Tandy says, not to Jess but to the sky. “They did—please, God, no.”

“Tandy—”

“ _No_ ,” Tandy says again, and starts to run. Six yards down the street, she wobbles up into the air, not running anymore but floating, spiraling like a living comet down an alley and vanishing up between the buildings. The street smells like molten asphalt and burned hair and scorched flesh and blood, and Bobby Karnelli is crying with his broken nose hidden underneath one hand. Mattie’s gone. Jess looks down at Karnelli, and then kicks him hard in the ribs, because seriously, fuck you, sir. A rib or two pops underneath her boot.

“Goddammit,” she says. Then she fists her hand up in Karnelli’s jacket, and starts dragging him along behind her.

.

.

.

She calls Trish once she’s finished washing the blood off her knuckles.

“Hey,” she says. “So, you can’t freak out if I don’t come back tonight.”

Trish is dead silent for a full ten seconds. Jess traipses around the office. “That’s never a good thing to say to me, Jessica.”

“I found our Maggia guy,” she says. Malcolm’s not in the office, sadly. It would have been funny to have him get all awkward. Jessica digs her camera out from under the bed. “He told me some stuff. I’m gonna be out for a while. Just wanted to let you know in case I don’t get back tonight.”

“What does _some stuff_ mean?”

“It means I’m not gonna be back for a while.”

Trish goes quiet again. “You’re going to beat him up, aren’t you?”

“Kind of already happened,” says Jess. “He was a douchebag. Whatever. Anyway, I’m probably going to be late.”

“Why?”

“Reasons.”

“ _Jessica_.”

“Look, I just spent like…four hours listening to Bobby Karnelli’s life fucking story, okay, can I not get questioned right now? He freaking told me about his first girlfriend. I told him to talk, not to tell me about whatever his first sexual experience was.”

“Ew,” says Trish. “You’re kidding me.”

“I wish. I’ll be back by midnight if things go okay, and if they don’t go okay then…I don’t know. By tomorrow maybe. Go home. Go do like…your actual job. I’ll call you when I get back.”

Trish makes a thoughtful noise. “You sure you don’t want to know what Ben Urich told me?”

“You mean the reporter actually had something?”

“Just rumors, mostly.” Jess looks at her fingernails, and starts picking at her pinky. “The Maggia’s been reorganizing itself over the past few months, ever since Fisk went down. He wasn’t officially a part of it, but he had some influence over a few of the families, and when he crashed and burned it reworked into a new system. Ben didn’t say a lot, because most of it’s stuff that could probably get him killed if they actually knew he knows this, but like…he said that the Manfredis have basically been a part of the LA and New York Maggia groups since they came over from Italy in the twenties. He doesn’t have proof, but Silvio’s listed as his top suspect for the head of the Manfredi Maggia branch.”

“Well, we knew that.”

“He had a little more information, too, so don’t get snotty.” Trish takes a breath. “Said that someone named Silvermane’s been sending feelers out into the underworld. Looking for geneticists, scientists. People who’d be willing to blend new drugs. MGH, specifically, but loads of other things, mostly to do with chemical or biological enhancements. He's even been playing with some pharmeceutical companies, according to Ben. Might be the first in a new roll-out plan of drug trafficking.”

“Silvermane?” says Jess.

“Ben thinks it’s a nickname for Silvio Manfredi.”

“Ugh. That’s almost as bad as Murdercorpse.”

“Just because you’re a criminal mastermind, it doesn’t mean you know how to name your pets.” Trish sighs. “You sure you don’t know when you’ll be back.”

“No. What did you tell Urich to get him to be so chatty?”

“I didn’t tell him anything, actually,” says Trish. “I mean, he knew who I was, he’s heard of the show. But he said he knew friends of yours.”

Jess rolls that over in her head. Something thunks into place. “Are you telling me Ben Urich works with Lilith and Daredevil?”

“I mean, Lilith tweets him sometimes. It’s possible.”

“Fuck me,” says Jess, for the millionth time today. It feels like she’s tripped into the middle of a human-sized chess game, and she doesn’t know which piece she is. She has the really, really unnerving feeling that she’s a pawn. “Jesus.”

“Jess, can you at least tell me what you’re planning on doing so I don’t like…stress out of my mind and use all your flour?”

“Why would you be using my flour?”

“I stress-bake. You know this.”

Jessica blows her hair out of her eyes. “Karnelli gave me an address, okay? I’m going to be looking into that. See if I can find anyone who can give me answers about Ty Johnson. Or, at least, get evidence.” Claire hasn’t called her. She makes a mental note. “Just—go home, okay, Trish? Seriously.”

“I have a show tomorrow I should be prepping for.” She sounds a little unsure, though. “Jess, seriously, if anything happens—”

“I’ll call my new bestie,” says Jessica. “I’m sure Lilith will just laugh at me if I get my nose broken again, but—”

“That’s not funny, Jess.”

“’s a little funny.”

“No,” says Trish, tiredly. “It’s not. Just—be careful, okay?”

Jess opens her mouth, and shuts it again. Then she says, “If you hear anything about shit going down in Columbia when you get to work, I swear to God, it wasn’t my fault.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Trish says. “Jess—”

She hangs up before Trish can say anything else. There are words pressed up against the roof of her mouth that feel almost like an apology. She swallows them down, and slams back out of the office.

There had been some good things in Karnelli’s rambling life story, most notably where one of the drug refineries that Silvermane uses is hidden in Hell’s Kitchen. “There’s a guy there named Bambino,” he’d said, after Jessica had finally untaped his mouth again. “Tall and dark. Scarred, down one cheek, here, like a crescent moon.”

“This isn’t a fucking movie, Karnelli.”

“I shit you not, looks like a crescent moon. Would I lie to you?”

“Yes,” Jess had said.

“Well, I’m not,” Karnelli had said, deflating. “Seriously. Bambino. Crescent scar. You find him, he’ll lead you to the kids.”

Claire has no news—“which, in this case, could be good or bad, and I told you I would call if anything changed, Jones, seriously—were you the one who sent the homeless kids over to visit, by the way, because that was fun to explain to the head of the ICU”—which means that when Jessica heaves herself up onto the fire escape of a supposedly unused warehouse out near the docks, it’s with exactly no new information on Ty Johnson, no idea where Tandy Bowen is, no clue where to start looking for her, and the sinking feeling that she’s stepped off the edge of a pool and fallen right into the deep end. _Too fucking short for this, Jessica_.

The warehouse windows are caked with old grime, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to heave one open. At least, it doesn’t for her. It makes a noise like a shrieking coyote and she has to wait a good three minutes before she’s certain no one noticed, but it opens, and she has a clear line of sight. It’s a drug production line, just like Karnelli had said. People keep funneling pills into bags, setting them aside. There are a few tables set up with liquids, like something out of a high school chemistry classroom. Aside from one or two workers, the place is empty. _Too early_ , she thinks. There’s one guard that she can make out, but it looks like he’s asleep in his chair. Which, if she were a Maggia boss trying to develop a new kind of MGH, then she would probably keep her workers out of sight during the daytime, too. She knocks her head to the railing of the fire escape, and stares up at the clouds. _I swear to God, if you fucking rain on me_ —

Of course it rains. She pulls her hood up over her head, and suffers.

It’s about nine o’clock at night when people finally start showing up in the warehouse, and a little later than that when the lights are turned on so people can work. She gets a few good shots of supervisors—she doesn’t recognize anyone, but maybe it’ll ring bells with some of the homeless kids—and of the people working, though they mostly seem to want to keep their heads down. Jess waits for an hour or two longer, watching, until she’s absolutely certain Bambino of the Crescent Shaped Scar isn’t gonna show, and then she sighs and clambers down the fire escape again, slipping three times and nearly falling to brain herself on the concrete. All the way to the top fucking floor. At least there were a few good shots, she thinks, as she touches ground. And if Lewis or Nelson or Murdock can match them up to perp shots in the NYPD’s books, then—

“You look like a drowned cat,” says a voice, and Jess whips around. There’s someone crouched on the second floor of her fire escape, and how the fuck Jess missed her on the way down, she has no idea. She puts up both hands. Something’s sticking up over her shoulder, almost like a bone. In the rain, she looks almost like a skeleton. “Hey, whoa. Don’t get hissy. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

Up on the fire escape, the girl— _fuck_ , Jess thinks, _fuck, that’s a bow on her back_ —cocks her head. The light from the warehouse window casts a bloody splash over her cheekbone. “Hawkeye,” she says. “Well, sometimes. Sometimes I’m just me. Now, who the fuck are you?”

“No one,” says Jessica. No one, who is getting a very bad headache. “Do all of you people just—can none of you tell when I’m doing fine on my own?”

“Well, yeah, I mean. We can tell. It’s just boring to sit and watch.” She drums her fingers against the railing. Sometimes-Hawkeye-Sometimes-Not vaults over the edge of the fire escape, lands hard on the next floor down, and then flips—she doesn’t jump, she flips, which is more than a little nauseating—from the second floor to the nearest dumpster and then rolls off onto the ground. She pops back up onto her feet as if she’s done nothing more notable than step off a curb. Her gloves are fingerless. “You make this face when you’re pissed where it looks like you’ve smelled something really nasty and it won’t get out of your scent range. It’s kind of hilarious.”

Jessica flips her off. “Have a point there, sparky?”

“Not really. It’s just funny to watch you make the face.”

“Gimme one good reason not to slam you headfirst into the ground right now.”

“I’m cute,” says Sometimes-Hawkeye-Sometimes-Not. She slips two fingers into her quiver, and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “And, y’know. Delivery. Tip me.”

Jessica snorts, and snatches the paper. Sometimes-Hawkeye-Sometimes-Not at least doesn’t try to play keep-away; she crosses her arms over her chest and watches through her dark-lensed sunglasses (sunglasses at midnight; she’s really fucking done with all of this) as Jessica unfolds the paper. It’s handwritten, the script spiky and loopy at once. She crumples it up in her hand. “Who’s this from?”

“Who do you think it’s from?” Sometimes-Hawkeye-Sometimes-Not (she has to come up with a new fucking name, Christ, that’s too long) snaps her gum, her mouth crooked, smile sharp. “You seeing some other vigilantes on the side? She’ll be sad about that.”

“If frickin’—if Nick and Nora have something they want to say to me, from now on, they come themselves. They don’t send little birdies.” Jessica looks down at the note again, and crumples it up in her fist. “You should tell them that.”

“You’re not gonna tell them yourself?” Sometimes—Crazycakes pushes her chin out, tipping her head towards the paper. “She wouldn’t’ve given me that if she didn’t want you in on this.”

“You going too?” When Crazycakes cocks her head (and seriously, all of them do that way too much, and she can’t work out why the gesture bothers her) Jessica lifts her closed fist. “Thought you hung around with those two psychos.”

She blows a bubble of vivid yellow gum, and cracks it between her teeth. “Not tomorrow. I have a thing. I’ll tell them you called them psychos, though, they’ll appreciate it.”

“Why the hell should I even show up? Tell me that much.”

“You’re the one who picked a fight the first time, _chibisuke_ ,” says Crazycakes. “If you really want to back out then you can, but don’t blame me if Lilith comes looking for you to ask why.”

And Lilith already knows where she lives. It’s a little unsettling. “Fine.” She shoves the note into her pocket. “Go away.”

“You don’t have anything you want me to carry back? No return note?”

“Sure,” says Jessica. “ _Dear Lilith: I am officially done with all your crap. Sincerely, JJ. PS: Fuck you._ ”

Crazycakes barks out a laugh. “You serious?”

“You think I’m not serious?”

“Cool.” She cocks one hip. “You sure you don’t want me to walk you home?”

“Fuck _off_.”

Crazycakes is laughing as she swings herself back up onto the fire escape, vanishing like a shadow into the dark. Jessica waits until she’s absolutely certain the girl’s gone before she unfolds the note, and scowls.

_Port Authority bus terminal at 2am tomorrow. Think there’s something you’ll want to see. Might want to wear gloves with actual fingers, leaving prints behind would be a bad idea. –L._

Jess crumples her note up, and shoves it into her pocket.

 _Fucking vigilantes_.

.

.

.

She’s just locked the door to the office behind her and dumped her shit on the desk when she hears the whine. Jessica thinks, for a second, that a dog’s somehow managed to get up to her apartment and hide itself under the bed again (strung-out Malcolm had had some interesting roommate ideas) before it shifts and turns more human. _Christ_. Trish. She’s having a nightmare. At least, Jess is pretty sure she’s having a nightmare. It’s also possible she’s getting herself off in Jess’s bed, but, y’know, it’s Trish. Trish wouldn’t cross that line. She’s about…95% sure.

“Trish?”

There’s no answer from the bedroom.

She doesn’t stop to think that someone might have broken in until she opens the door. For a second, Jessica wonders if she’s going to have to hurt someone. But no, it’s just Trish—she’s sitting, curled, her knees pressed up close against her chest, and she’s awake but not, asleep but not, knocking a hand against her head. The jerkiness of it isn’t natural.

 _Put a bullet in your skull_ , Kilgrave had said.

“Aw, shit, Trish,” Jess says, and she’s up on the bed before she remembers that she actually…doesn’t know what to do with people when they’re like this. She can manage it in the moment, but flashbacks aren’t her territory. She has enough of her own to handle. “Trish, hey. Trish.”

“It has to go in my head,” Trish says, and she’s not quite out of it yet. Her eyes are glassy and dazed. “It has to—”

“Trish.” Jess snags Trish’s clenched fist. Trish isn’t strong enough to yank away, or to keep hitting herself, but she does her damnedest. Her lips part, like she’s confused. “Trish, wake up.”

“It has to go in my head.”

“Can you not fucking say that? You’re dreaming. It’s a nightmare.” Something digs its nails into the back of her mouth. “Trish, c’mon. Wake up.”

“It has to go in my head.”

“Wake up,” Jess says, and shakes her. “Trish. Come on.”

“It has to go in my head.”

The thing with nightmares, Jess thinks, is that you can’t always wake up from them. “Fuck,” she says, and gets back off the bed to go dig in the freezer. She doesn’t exactly have bullets in the house, and she doesn’t want Trish to choke herself on a stone or like…a coin or something, but she does have ice cubes. She knocks a few into a cup, and takes off her shoes before clambering back up onto the mattress. There’s no Kilgrave, not this time. It’s just Trish, hitting herself, harder and harder and harder until Jess can get her hand back where it’s supposed to go, in between Trish and whatever’s trying to hurt her.

“Open your mouth,” says Jess. Trish shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “Jesus, Trish.”

“It has to go in my head.”

“It will, just—open your mouth, okay? Open your mouth.”

Trish shakes her head again.

“Fuck this so much,” says Jess. She scrapes an ice cube up out of the cup, and opens Trish’s mouth the exact way she used to force open her Golden Retriever’s mouth, pushing hard at the joints and popping her teeth apart without breaking a sweat. The ice cube’s freezing cold, the way metal would be, and when Jess covers Trish’s mouth with her hand to keep her from spitting it out, Trish’s fingers spasm in the strangest way. She wants to puke. Jess shakes her head once or twice, trying to clear her vision—it’s stupid, that her eyes have gone so blurry, but for fuck’s sake, she should have killed the bastard before he could get to Trish, before this happened, before Trish had any more shit dumped on her head—and lets out a breath. She brushes Trish’s hair out of her eyes, and waits for her to blink.

It takes her a little bit. Trish’s eyes don’t focus until she swallows, until the ice cube clicks against the back of her teeth. Then, slowly, her pupils adjust. Jess sits there, staring, watching it, and something—something unwinds in her chest when Trish reaches up, and draws Jess’s hand away from her mouth. “Are you trying to smother me?”

“You had a nightmare,” says Jess shortly, and gets off the bed. “I’m going to shower. Don’t…choke on ice or something while I’m in there, I don’t want to have to drag two dead bodies out of my bed in a year.”

“Technically you didn’t drag the first one.”

Jess responds to this very maturely by slamming the bathroom door.

Her water heater is still doing stupid shit. She deals with three five minute cycles of hot-cold-hot-cold-iceberg, and then she shuts off the water, and stands under the dripping showerhead for a while, watching the suds spiral down the drain. “Fuck,” she says again, very quietly. Her hands are shaking, and she can’t seem to get them to stop. “Fucking hell.”

_Birch Street. Higgins Drive. Cobalt fucking...whatever._

She avoids Malcolm’s little Kilgrave recovery group just because of this. She doesn’t like seeing it on anybody but her. She doesn’t even like seeing it on her, but, you know, shit happens, it’s how she is, and she’d just…goddammit. She knows Kilgrave broke so many more people than just her, she knows that she’s not the only one that’s been fucked all to hell, but Christ, he shouldn’t have had the chance to do it. “Should’ve fucking stayed dead,” she tells the wad of hair over her drain. “Should’ve died in the goddamn accident.” So many people hurt or dead or ruined because he’d had the gall to stay alive, and she’d been too damn slow to stop him.

 _Hope_ , she thinks. _Trish_.

Jess turns her face up to the ceiling, to the cracks in the plaster. Then she gets out of the shower and snags a kleenex off the back of the toilet to pick the sucker up. (It’s surprising that she even does it, but it’s…kind of reaching hairball territory. Besides, Trish rubs off all her Responsible Cleanly Adult germs whenever she spends more than an hour at the office. It’s nauseating.) When she finally leaves the bathroom, Trish is sitting with her back up against the wall and her laptop on her knees, her hair up. Her eyes are a little red, and all the ice cubes are gone.

“Trish.” Jessica pulls on underwear under the towel, and then turns her back on Trish, drapes the towel over the top of the closet door. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Not gonna fall back to sleep.” She glances over the top of the computer screen, and then drops her eyes again in the second before Jess yanks a shirt on over her head. “Did you find anything?”

“Warehouse,” says Jess. “Have some creeper cam photos. Won’t be enough to prove Ty was made to take the drugs, though.”

“What else did Karnelli tell you?”

“Said that there’s a guy who can take me to where they test on the kids, but Bambino didn’t show up. I’ll look again tomorrow night.” Jess tugs her hair out from the collar of the shirt, and wonders if she ought to do something about how it’s dripping. “I’m wondering if he was just bullshitting me.”

Trish presses her lips together, like she’s trying very hard not to say something. Or not to smile, Jess isn’t really sure. “Well, I mean, did you break any of his bones, or—”

“Not as many as I could have.” She thinks. “Well, I think.”

“You’re pretty quarterback for your itty bitty body.”

“Shut up.” For once, she actually wears pajama pants. She’s not entirely sure sleeping in a shirt and panties is gonna be completely kosher if Trish is going to be kipping on the other side. Jess flops down onto the mattress, and stares at the ceiling. “No, there was—there was someone else there.”

“Lilith?”

“Definitely not Lilith.” Jess angles a look at Trish, and then says, with great satisfaction, “Tandy Bowen. She was lighting things on fire. And she could fly.”

Silence from behind the computer.

“Lock your goddamn balcony door,” says Jessica, and shuts her eyes. She doesn’t actually sleep, not for a long time. Still, she pretends long enough that when Trish starts stroking her hair absentmindedly, she doesn’t have an excuse to pull away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaand because Jess is irritating, Trishica does not quite flower. BUT. There are lots of things thought and said. And...I mean, for Jess, this is surprisingly healthy. 
> 
> I reorganized The Making of Monsters series lists, by the way, so all the sidefics for TPoW? Are in their own section now. Keep an eye out. 
> 
> Unbeta'ed. Meh.

Jessica wakes up with shades of purple clinging in her head, her arm torqued and twisted high behind her back, her mouth full of pillow, and Trish saying her name, over and over. “Jess, it’s okay, Jess, it’s me, you’re good, you were dreaming, Jessica, it’s okay—”

“Let me go,” says Jess, trying to pretend that the dull stinging in her cheeks isn’t embarrassment. Or her nose. It’s probably her nose, to be honest. “I’m not gonna break your face.”

“You came close,” Trish says, shortly, but she lets go of Jessica’s wrist. She also (and Jess wonders how the hell she didn’t realize this part) gets off of Jess herself, from where she’s straddled her back to keep her fixed to the bed. “I touched your shoulder to try and wake you and you came at me.”

Fucking hell. She hasn’t had a dream that bad in a while. She can’t even remember what it was, but there’s a taste in her mouth like barf, and her blood’s racing, and her heart’s running way too fast, sprinting where it should be walking. “So you maga’d me?” Jess says, trying to keep her voice even. _Birch Street, come on, Jones. Birch Street, Higgins Drive._

“Instinct,” says Trish. She searches Jessica’s face. Jess thinks, for a minute, that she might say something, that she might ask, but instead she just slips off the mattress. “Your phone’s been ringing on and off for an hour.”

 _Higgins Drive—_ “You didn’t answer?”

“I did, but she said she’d only talk to you.”

Jessica presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Fuck.”

“You want me to tell her to go away?”

“No.” She has a pretty good idea of who it could be, if it’s a woman who’ll only talk to Jessica Jones. “No, just—fuck. Gimme a minute.”

Trish hesitates. She strokes a hand through Jess’s hair, so very lightly she could be touching a wild animal, scared it’s going to bite her. Jess has to fight very hard not to flinch. Trish puts her mouth to Jessica’s scalp, just as lightly, and then she walks away. Jessica sits on the end of the mattress until her stomach can’t take it anymore, and she has to bolt for the toilet before she pukes all over the bedspread.

The phone’s ringing again by the time she’s done brushing her teeth. The number’s not one she recognizes, but when she puts the phone to her ear, snaps out, “Alias Investigations, talk,” it’s Claire Temple on the other end.

“Ty Johnson’s gone.”

Fucking hell. _Shit rolls downhill_ , she thinks, Silvio Manfredi to Columbia to Hell’s Kitchen to her, in her shitty little office full of holes. “Please, God, tell me this is a fucking joke.”

“Somebody took him. Nobody knows why or where.” Claire’s speaking very softly, like she’s pressed into a corner and trying to hide it. “The cops have been and gone already. They said they’re gonna look into it, but they didn’t even check the surveillance feed.”

Shit. “I’ll call his lawyers,” says Jess. “You said he was in a coma. You said he might never wake up. Why would they take him?”

Claire sucks her teeth. “Just—you’d better get down here.”

Her heart leaps up into her throat. Jessica stomps it back down with her shoe. “Anyone hurt?”

“No.” says Claire. “But _I_ looked at the feed, even if the cops didn’t, and just—you need to see this before they get back and take it all.”

“See what?”

“Just get here,” says Claire. “Ask for me, they’ll let you in. Just—hurry.”

“Claire—”

Claire’s already hung up. Jess throws her phone onto the desktop, and presses her hands to her face again. It’s dark, when she does this, quieter. It’s not the fucking insane carousel on speed that is the world. Trish clicks over the floor. “Jess?”

“I have to go to the hospital,” she says, but she doesn’t move for a moment. Jess pushes her hair back up out of her face. “Fucking hell.”

“What happened?”

“Someone took Ty.”

Trish presses her lips into a thin line. When she grabs her coat, Jess, for once, doesn’t argue with her.

They have to wait for a few minutes at the front desk before Claire comes down to meet them, hands fisted in the pockets of her soft blue cardigan. There are rings under her eyes, big enough to turn her into a panda, and though she gives Trish a long, considering look, she doesn’t comment. “This way,” she says, and takes them not to the elevator but to the emergency stairs. She glances at Jess out of the corner of her eye as soon as the stairwell door’s shut behind them. “Your face is doing better.”

“For once,” Jess says. “I’ve been dragged around with hocus pocus crap for days now, Claire, can you just like—what am I gonna be looking at, here?”

Claire folds her arms tight across her stomach. Her cardigan’s going to stretch out, Jess thinks. Turn into a mess of bad wool. “I don’t know exactly how to describe it,” she says, after a moment. “I just—I don’t know.”

Claire, Jess thinks, doesn’t rattle easily. Claire had stuck a needle into Luke Cage’s brain while he was seizing. Claire had heaved them both into a car and driven them home and dealt with unbreakable skin and super strength and mind control without batting an eye. Claire’s buddies with Daredevil and Lilith and probably has had way more shit from them than Jess has ever put her through, and Claire’s scared. That in and of itself is enough to be pants-shitting. Jessica crosses her arms over her chest. “Show me.”

Claire’s eyes dart to Trish, just for an instant. She sighs. “Come on.”

The security room is empty. Claire drops down into a rolling chair, wiggles the mouse and types a code into the computer. “I used to date one of the guards,” she says. “He was an asshole, but he was transferred upstate, thankfully, and they never rescinded his old codes.” Her mouth twists a little. “Mike was more helpful after he left than he ever was when he actually worked here.”

“Were you working last night?”

“No, it was my night off. I came in at about five this morning. Ty was already gone.” She hits a few keys. “We have cameras in the halls, but not the rooms, for privacy purposes, so I have no idea how they managed to get him out of the cuffs. But this is where they ended up.”

The timestamp in the corner of the feed reads _2:39._ There’s no nurse on duty at the desk, no one in the hall. Judging by the sour look on Claire’s face, this isn’t normal. Before Jess has to ask, she points at the screen. “Last night it was supposed to be Alycia, here,” she says, and taps at the desk. “She said she went to get coffee, but she doesn’t drink coffee, so I have no idea where she ended up.”

“Is she the type who’d take money for something like this?” Trish pulls her hands out of her pockets. “I mean, they could have paid her off.”

“I’d like to think I don’t work with people who can be paid to keep their mouths shut about a kidnapping,” snaps Claire.

“What about the other patients?”

“They’re scared, they won’t say anything.” Claire swivels around in her chair to look at Jess. “Pretty sure this is self-explanatory.”

2:40, and three men are slinking out of Ty Johnson’s hospital room. They’re in actual fucking ski masks, which, gross, guys, but she’s fairly sure from the glimpses of skin at their wrists and at their throats that they’re white. Uniformly six foot to six foot three, heavy, two-fifty at the lightest maybe. Big guys like Bobby Karnelli. Who’d turned out to be a whiny little snot, Jess thinks, but that’s neither here nor there. Bobby Karnelli had been facing down not only Tandy Bowen, basically the Girl On Fire, but also Jessica Jones, and she’s kind of used to turning big, terrifying men into spineless children. Here, it’s three against one, and the one is unconscious, and probably dying, and they’re just…dragging him out like trash.  Ty’s suspended between them, one on each of his shoulders, one holding his ankles.

“Here,” says Claire. She taps at the screen with the tip of her finger. “The past few days there’s been no read on Ty at all, basically no brain function, deep coma, not something that any of the doctors thought he’d wake up from even with his musculatory responses, but right _here_ —”

She cuts herself off, because on the screen, Ty Johnson seizes. His spine snaps back, his head twists, his arms and legs draw close in to his chest like a beetle’s, and the three guys stagger with the suddenness of it. The one holding his legs drops them. Ty yanks his knees up to his chest, curling into a ball, and compared to the men he’s skinny and fragile-looking, like something already snapped into pieces.

And then—

“Holy fuck,” Jessica says, because it’s Tandy in reverse. It’s not brightness, it’s darkness; it’s not a comet, it’s a black hole; it’s the _absence_ of everything, and it’s raw and wild and suddenly _there_ , breaking through the air like a split between worlds. “Holy _fucking_ hell—”

One of the men is gone. He’s there, and he turns, and Jessica can see his mouth open, eyes wide, screaming, and then he’s vanished into the maw. The second man tries to run, but tongues of darkness snag him around the ankles. He’s more than three-quarters gone when the third man, the one who’d been behind Ty, the one who’d held one of his shoulders, seizes a fire extinguisher and whacks Ty once, hard, on the back of the head. And then it’s gone, the darkness, whatever the hell it was. It’s gone, and Ty is just Ty, and there’s a bloodless severed head lying on the floor of the hallway.

The third man’s made of stronger stuff than Bobby Karnelli. He steadies himself, drinks something out of a hip flask. (Jess doesn’t blame him. She really wants a fucking drink right now.) Then he heaves Ty up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, steals a backpack from behind the desk to stow the head in, and vanishes from the camera’s line of sight.

“He took him down the emergency stairs, put him in the trunk of a car, and drove off,” says Claire. She looks up at Jess again. “No license plate. I already checked.”

“Holy shit,” Trish says, and then again. “Holy _shit._ ”

“Play it again.” Jess digs her fingernails hard into the back of the chair. “Can you slow it down?”

“Yeah, just—” Claire taps a few more keys. Her hands are steady. “It’s at half-speed.”

They watch it again. And again. Trish has to leave the third time. Probably to throw up, Jessica thinks. _Join the brigade. Today’s a barf day._ It’s on the fourth playthrough that Claire says, “If you want a copy of this, you should get it now, I have no idea when the cops could come back.”

“If they walked off without even looking at the surveillance then they’re probably not going to be back for a while.” That, or they were cops in Manfredi’s employ, which given his association with Silver and Brent, one of Fisk’s front companies, she’s…not willing to discount at this point. Jess fumbles a thumb drive out of her pocket and hands it over so Claire can copy-paste. “Shit. Did your labs ever finish those tests on what was in his system?”

“Depends on how you define _finish_. Most of them came back positive for MGH, but no blend we’ve ever seen before. There were some chemicals in it that the labs are still trying to sort out.” She sighs. “I don’t think they’re having much luck with it. Every time I go in there to check they look more pissed.”

“Like what?”

“You want the long names or just a basic explanation? Because I can lecture you on pharmaceuticals all day, and it probably won’t help you.”

Jess blows hair out of her eyes. “Basic explanation.”

“Thought so,” says Claire. “MGH is exactly what it sounds like. In essence it’s a distillation of the hormone excreted by the brains of people who carry the X-gene—in other words, mutants. People with higher excretions of MGH usually exhibit or manifest mutant properties, ranging from enhanced strength—” she eyes Jess again “—to telepathy to animalistic properties to basically everything under the sun. During the Cold War a scientist named Henry McCoy distilled that down to its most basic chemical form after years of experimentation, and that’s the MGH that is the basis of what we know.”

Trish comes back from the bathroom, still dabbing at her mouth like she’s worried she’s going to throw up on the floor. When she comes closer, she links her hand through Jessica’s arm, and Jess lets her, for once. Her fingers are shaking.

“Originally it was only intended for testing in a laboratorial context, working with mutant tissues and fluids in order to be better able to treat those with mutant disorders.” Claire rubs at her forehead, watching the download flicker through percentages. “Of course it was leaked, and regular people realized that if they took MGH—usually cut, because _pure_ MGH is actually hell on the system of a regular person, it fries your brain because there isn’t the relevant genetic material to be able to process it properly—they could temporarily develop powers like those of a super- or a mutant-human. It’s a little harder to find than blow or smack or whatever else you want to take to get high, but if you’re stubborn enough you can usually get your hands on it.”

“But that’s not what’s in Ty’s system.”

“To the best of our knowledge the base chemical compounds contain MGH, but the rest of it…no.” She rubs at her forehead again. “We did some blood testing. Ty does carry the X-gene, but he also has a number of genetic markers that usually inhibit the exhibition of latent mutant abilities. My best guess? That—” she gestures to the screen “—whatever that was, that was the MGH and all the other compounds it’s been boosted with basically forcing Ty to manifest. The rest of the stuff we found in his bloodstream, outside of the sleeping pills—which they may have forced him to take, I’m not sure, there were bruises around his mouth that I didn’t like the look of—was a steroidal cocktail, but there were a few things that the scientists couldn’t even begin to identify. They said it was too advanced for them, some kind of—of weird stem cell regenerative thing.”

“So basically what you’re telling me is that Ty Johnson and Tandy Bowen were both latent mutants and this—shit that someone put in their system has activated their abilities?”

“Tandy Bowen?”

“Columbia’s Sunshine Girl,” says Jess, because apparently that’s what Twitter’s been calling her. Then again, she’s pretty sure Twitter’s also the one who picked _the Angel of Mercy_ for Lilith, so she doesn’t trust Twitter’s ability to properly name anything or anybody.

“Ah,” says Claire. “Yes, I would say so. Activated and enhanced to an insane degree.” The computer pips, and Claire yanks the thumb drive out of the port, clapping it back into Jessica’s hand. “At least, so far as I can gather. It’s possible I’m wrong. I’m a nurse, not a lab rat. I don’t run a lot of these tests, and I’m _definitely_ not an expert in mutations or hormonal steroids.”

“What would be the purpose of that, though?” Trish shakes her head. “If someone’s trying to blend a new kind of MGH that’s one thing, that has some kind of street application, but adding steroids into it—is it some kind of health cocktail?”

“Who knows?” Claire heaves herself up out of the chair. “It’s more than possible that it was developed for some kind of medical treatment—there have been tests with MGH blended into vaccines, and animal trials have actually had some good results, when the mice didn’t blow up in their cages.”

“That’s a pleasant image,” says Jess. Trish looks a little green again. “And if someone wanted to conduct human trials without going through the FDA—”

“—who I’m like ninety percent sure would not approve this,” Claire says, “ever, basically, unless some big politician type shoves a lot of money down their throats, and even then—”

“—then street kids would be their best bet.”

“They wouldn’t, actually,” says Claire. “Hormone levels don’t steady out in the human body until you’re in your early twenties. So unless there’s some deliberate mindfuckery going on with—”

She stops. Her eyes get big. Then, quietly, viciously, she says, “Fucking hell.”

“What?”

“Generally puberty is when the X-gene properly manifests,” says Claire. “Usually if you’re a mutant that’s going to develop some kind of ability, it’ll happen between the ages of eleven and nineteen, maybe a year or two later if you’re unlucky. The surge of hormones from puberty seems to jumpstart the MGH, in a way, and usually the two phenomena are concurrent in a mutant body. The MGH in these drug tests seems to be purer than you can usually get on the street, high hormonal concentrations—it’s possible whoever is testing this isn’t trying to develop some new street drug at all, he could be trying to build—”

“An army,” says Trish, very quietly. Jess’s stomach bottoms out. “Or—or some kind of honor guard.” 

“You’re shitting me.” Jess rubs her eyes again. “Fucking hell, you’re _shitting_ me. There’s no proof of that.”

“I mean, think about it, Jess—if it’s a crime lord testing mutant growth hormone on street kids, purer stuff, not just temporary, and then you factor in steroids—it sounds like he’s trying to create some kind of weapon.”

 _Silvermane,_ Jess thinks. There are goosebumps down her spine. _Silvio Manfredi, head of the Manfredi Maggia._

“Which is exactly what Hell’s Kitchen needs right now, believe me,” says Claire, in a voice dryer than the Sahara. “Not like I already get knife wounds every night, now I need—freaking missing arms from kids who can expel black holes from their skin, Jesus.”

“And if they’re young,” Trish says, “then—then theoretically they’d be easier to control, they’d feel like they owe whoever it is for taking them off the street, for making them stronger. It’s classic manipulation, and it’s probably worked on some of them, let’s be real, not all the names Santino gave us have turned up dead.”

“Fuck.” Her skin is crawling. _You sure this isn’t hitting just a little too close to home for you?_ Trish had said, and before it hadn’t been, not really, but now she’s going to be sick and she can see Hope in the back of her head, blood spurting out her throat, screaming— “ _Fuck._ ”

“Just seems like they bit off more than they could chew with Tandy and Ty,” says Trish. She purses her lips. “If Ty wakes up again then it…could go really badly. Whatever he was doing, there—it snipped that guy’s head off like a dandelion. No blood, nothing.”

“He should be out for a while,” says Claire. “If he doesn’t have brain damage he’ll at least have some kind of concussion from a blow like that, it’ll keep him unconscious. And if they’re smart about it, they’ll sedate him.”

“Pity,” says Jess. “If he blew up a warehouse with his black hole shtick, it’d be much easier to find him.”

“ _Jess._ ”

“Don’t tell anyone you gave me this.” Jess detaches from Trish, stares hard at Claire. “Seriously, don’t. If the people I’m looking into are the ones after Ty Johnson then you could—you could end up in serious trouble.”

“Believe me.” Claire stands, and brushes the backs of her scrubs like she’s trying to wipe away a stain. “I’m not telling anyone about this. I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

“Not anyone?”

Claire gives her a considering look. “Maybe one person. Or possibly two.”

“What—” Trish starts to say, but Jess steps on her foot before it can get all the way out her mouth. _Daredevil_ , she thinks. _Daredevil and Lilith._ Yeah, Claire Temple knows how to shut her mouth and duck her head and keep on trucking, if she has to.

She still reaches out and touches Claire’s shoulder, squeezing awkwardly (Claire blinks at her like she’s just tried to bite) before leaving without a goodbye.

It takes a few seconds for Trish to catch up. Probably apologizing or asking some questions or something, Jess isn’t sure. Super hearing isn’t something she’s been cursed with, thank fuck. She’s standing at the elevator doors and jabbing at the down button with her thumb when Trish finally jogs up behind her, heels clicking on the tile. “Jess, where are you going?”

“To look for Ty.” She whacks at the button again. “Or Tandy, either way. Whichever one of them will be easier to find.”

She has a feeling it’ll be Tandy. It’s harder to hide being a human glowstick, especially when you’re conscious and wandering around the city looking for revenge. If Tandy’s looking into Silvermane, then Jess will have to run into her eventually. Process of elimination.

“Jessica,” says Trish, in the _for God’s sake, look at me, will you_? voice. Rationally, she thinks, Jess does not look at Trish. “Seriously, slow down, we have to come up with a better plan than that—”

“If I slow down one or both of them will probably wind up dead.” The door pings, and opens. Jess has to step aside and wait for a flood of nurses and visitors to get the fuck out of the way before ducking into the elevator, and jamming at the _close door_ button. Trish darts in as the doors start sliding shut. “That’s not something I’m gonna let happen, Trish.”

“Of course it isn’t, but you were the one saying we can’t draw too much attention from Manfredi right now, and if you run off and start ripping trees up looking for Tandy or Ty then I guarantee you the guy will notice.” 

There’s something building in her throat that might be a scream. She turns it into a shout. “What if I don’t give a shit?”

“You should,” Trish says, her voice all razor wire. “Because Tandy and Ty aren’t the only kids that that bastard’s done this to.”

Jess shuts her eyes, and breathes in through her nose. _Birch Street, goddamn you._ “Trish.”

“You’re the one who said it, Jess. Clean sweep. If he knows we’re looking into it, he could kill them, all those kids, and I’m not—I don’t want that to happen. I know you don’t either.”

Jessica wipes her hands up over her face, yanks at her hair a little. She wants to pound her head against the nearest wall. All she can see is a line of bodies in nooses and Kilgrave and Hope waiting at the end of it, a bar and a pipe and a broken wine glass and blood, everywhere, _blood_ — “Fuck.”

Trish doesn’t touch her. It’s about the only good thing about this moment. If Trish reached out right now. Jess would probably break her wrist. “What about that guy you were looking for yesterday, Bambino, what if we find him?”

“He wasn’t at the warehouse.” And she has a place to meet Lilith and Daredevil, but that’s not until two in the morning. Jess digs her teeth into her tongue. “No one was there last night, except some dumbass guard and a few assembly workers, and who knows if they’re still there. I can go back and look, but they probably don’t have a clue. Manfredi hasn’t managed to get this far by being stupid.”

The elevator doors slide open. Trish shuts her mouth. A few people pile in, mostly nurses or admin people, she’s pretty sure. Jess backs into the wall, and closes her eyes. _In and out._ This isn’t Kilgrave. This isn’t mind control. This is just…regular people doing terrible things, and that’s something she knows how to deal with, isn’t it? She’s dealt with that before. This isn’t arms in blenders or Hope wetting herself in a bed she can’t leave. This is just one stupid old man trying to build himself a mutant army, and that she can deal with.

_Christ, I wish Clemons were alive right now._

“I’ll think of something,” she tells Trish. “You should go to work.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

Trish catches her hand and squeezes it, just for a moment. Then she lets go. “Okay.”

The 15th Precinct smells like it always does, BO and bad coffee and metal and plastic. It’s probably her imagination that’s making her think she can still catch hints of blood, that there’s a severed head somewhere, but her imagination’s never been nice to her and who knows what reality is, anyway? When she stops a few feet from the desk, the sergeant lifts his head, and sighs.

“You again,” he says. “You have another bag of surprises?”

“Not exactly.” Jess fists her hands up in her pockets. “Just, uh. I’m looking for a name.”

“Why would I be giving you a name?”

“Because I’m trying to keep some innocent kid from going to jail for—” She stops, pinches her nose, breathes in and out. “I just need a name, okay?”

Mahoney doesn’t say anything, for a minute. He stares at her. Jess stares back at him, because fuck these intimidation tactics, seriously, she’s really done with them, doesn’t appreciate them _at all_. Then he sighs through his nose. “You working that thing?”

Jess blinks. “What?”

“That thing that Nelson won’t shut up about, with the kid in the hospital. You working that thing?”

 _Nelson?_ She thinks, and then it clicks. The round guy, the one that Santino had messed with. The one who didn’t trust PIs. “Yeah, I’m working that thing.”

“They said someone might come in.” He looks exasperated. She’s starting to wonder if this is a typical thing for anyone who works with Nelson, Murdock, and Lewis, if they all come out of the circumstance feeling as though they need to jam someone’s face into a copy machine and bash them over the head with the lid. “Figured it’d be del Toro, she seems more their type.”

Jess wrinkles her nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just saying, Angela del Toro hasn’t dumped a severed head on my desk in the past six months.” He slips off his stool. “I’m going on break.”

“What?”

“Can I help it if someone stands with me while I’m on break?” he says, and rolls his eyes. “Gimme two minutes.”

Jessica heads outside. It barely takes ninety seconds before Mahoney’s followed her out, two shitty paper cups roosting in his hands. “Here,” he says, and gives one to her. It’s some of the bad coffee. Still, it’s caffeinated. Jess blows on it once or twice, and stares at the sidewalk until a few of the uniforms wander off.

“What’s this about, Jones?” Mahoney curls both hands around his coffee, not looking at her. “Foggy has a bee up his ass about something to do with that kid in Metro-General, and the other two—well. I mean, they’re always kinda pissy, but it’s worse than usual this time. Something happening that we should know about?”

 _Depends. Do you want a horde of crazed mutant experiments running through Hell’s Kitchen?_ “I heard a name from a guy the other day, someone to do with the Maggia. Bambino? Kind of mid-level, higher-up maybe, has a crescent scar on his cheek. Wondering if you know him.”

“Lots of people know him. Scar’s pretty distinctive.” He sketches it out with his forefinger. “Real name’s Bruno Costa.”

“I thought the Costas had their own Maggia branch?”

“They did, but they threw in with Fisk in a bad way. When that fell apart, Bruno skipped right on over to the Manfredis. Smarter than the rest of his family, somehow. Has a record, been to jail once or twice, but we haven’t been able to snag him for the past five years. Driving the detectives crazy, to be honest. All of which,” he adds, “you could’ve learned on Google. Matter of public record.”

“Don’t have time to crawl through a Google search right now.” The coffee’s making her tongue curl. “What have the lawyers been saying?”

“Like I said, not much.” Mahoney presses his thumb into the lip of his cup. “You think they’re on to something here? Only the last time they were nosing around like this, Fisk came down on all our heads. And the last time _you_ were nosing around—”

He stops, because how do you say _I had a British guy mind control me into holding a gun on my fellow officers and then laugh about it?_ Except, you know, like that. Without sounding batshit insane.

“Shouldn’t be the same level of crap,” Jess says. She finishes the coffee, and crumples the paper cup in her hand. “I don’t think.”

“Because that’s reassuring.”

“Look, just—that kid, Ty Johnson, he didn’t do anything bad. That’s what they hired me for, to find out if he’d like…been in possession, or whatever. He didn’t take those drugs willingly, and neither did any of those other kids, and just—can you get your guys off their backs for a while? Seriously.”

Mahoney does that watching thing again. It’s the same careful, prying look that Clemons used to use on them, when they’d talked about Kilgrave. _Christ, why did GI Joe have to go and shoot him? Clemons at least would believe me._ Then he sips at his coffee again, carefully. “What other kids?”

“You haven’t noticed all the kids coming in with needles in their eyes?” She tosses the crumpled cup into the garbage can at the bottom of the steps. “It’s been pretty consistent.”

“I don’t get a chance to look at every ME’s report.” Still, his eyebrows clench together in a way that makes her think she might have hit a nerve. “How long has this been going on?”

“Maybe a year back? From what I can tell.” Jess sucks her teeth. “You want names?”

“Please.”

“Not gonna be pretty.”

“Didn’t sign on for pretty,” he says. “Signed on to help.”

Jessica watches him for a second or two. Then she offers her hand. “Phone.” Mahoney hands it over without a word, and she taps her number in before sending herself a text. She’s forwarding all the names that Malcom’s texted her over the past thirty-six hours when she says, “You’re being nice, it’s weird.”

“It’s weird for people to be nice?”

“Weird for cops.”

Mahoney huffs. “Clem talked about you people a little bit. Made me think. Besides, if you’re working for Lewis and Murdock, then you’re probably crazy, but that doesn’t make you bad crazy. Just makes you crazy.”

She smacks the phone back into his hand. “I owe you.”

“Figure names clear names.” He slips his cell back into his pocket. “You ask me anything else, then you owe me. Not ‘til then.”

“Whatever,” Jess says. There’s a taxi at the curb, and Jeri Hogarth— _fuck, are you shitting me right now?_ —is clambering out of the back seat. “Fuck.”

Mahoney follows her gaze, and winces. “Ah, shit.”

“You know her?”

“ _You_ know her?”

“She’s like Cruella de Ville and she wants my skin,” says Jess, and pulls up her hood. “Have fun, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, fuck you,” says Mahoney, but she’s already darted off. When she turns at the corner, Hogarth and Mahoney are having a discussion that’s making Mahoney look like he wants to shoot himself. She salutes him with two fingers, and disappears into an alley.

,

,

,

It’s easier to find people when you have a name, but even if you have a name, tracking down someone who’s part of the Maggia and prides himself on not getting caught is…difficult. It takes her all day before she finally finds someone who’s willing to blab something about Bruno “Bambino” Costa’s whereabouts, and it’s the secretary of an assistant of a colleague who just mentions in an aside to “Mr. Manfredi’s PA—no, not that Manfredi, a baby Manfredi, you know how it is.” “Oh, Mr. Costa will probably be out of the Garment District within the next few hours, if you could let your people know that he’ll be available” and that at least gives her a general location. She doesn’t know the Garment District as well as she knows Chelsea, and definitely not as well as she knows Hell’s Kitchen, but she can at least make elementary guesses.

Silver and Brent is a huge building that dominates the middle of the Garment District’s many neighborhoods. Still, it looks like a fallen giant, somehow, the parking garage mostly empty even at six pm, and a sign posted on the inside of the glass doors reading _absolutely no press_. Jess doesn’t go in the front, though; she takes the emergency stairs, jumping from floor to floor until she hits twenty-seven, and snapping the knob off the door with her sleeve pressed over her hand to keep herself from leaving prints.

She’s standing in between three cubicles and thinking about exit strategies when she realizes this…might not actually be the best way to keep Manfredi from noticing that she’s looking into this. Jess bolts back into the emergency stairwell again. _Fuck._ Okay, there’s that scuppered. She still wants to beat the crap out of Bruno Costa, but she needs to at least figure out if he’s in the building.

 _Think straight, Jessica, come on._   

She makes a call to the front desk, fakes a slightly teary, hysterical voice—which isn’t that hard—to ask where exactly security is because “you know Bob, in records, he just tried to like—attack me and I really want to sit with security right now, please.” The main desk sends security six floors up from where she is. They actually pass her in the elevator on her way down to the second floor, which, as the floor guide tells her, is where the main security office is. The one guy left inside doesn’t even realize she’s come in until she’s seized the nearest keyboard, and whacked him hard across the back of the head. There’s coffee dripping from his tie when Jess shoves him out of the chair.

“Amateurs.” She frowns at him, and prods him out of the way with her foot. “Seriously.”

She only has a few minutes before security realizes they’ve been played, but it doesn’t take that long to cycle through all the feeds. The crescent-shaped scar makes it easier. Costa’s getting out of the parking garage elevator, flicking through his keys with one hand. She’d passed that goddamn car on the way in, hadn’t she? Freaking expensive-as-fuck Mercedes thing. _Figures._ Jess glances back over her shoulder at the door, and scribbles the license plate down onto a spare notepad.

She leaves a post-it reading _April Fool’s, suckers_ on the outside of the door, which…she’s a few months off. But it’ll freak them out. And the guy she whacked should be fine. She’s hit people harder and had them come out okay.

Tracking a car is hard fucking work when you can jump, not fly, and when you’re trying to keep an eye on it from rooftops instead of freakin’ sidewalk maneuvers. She loses him twice, and it’s actually a miracle she manages to pick up the trail again—car crash with an ambulance slowed him up, and if that’s not ironic she’s really not certain what is. It’s a very different part of the Hell’s Kitchen waterfront where Bruno Costa finally puts his car into park, and vanishes into one of the smaller buildings. Not warehouses but shipping containers, a maze of primary colors like a kindergartner’s building blocks. He’s vanished into the foreman’s office, she thinks, a temporary building that would cave with one flick of her finger. Jess wedges herself between two containers, a good ten feet off the ground, and presses her back against the cold metal to wait.

 _Bruno Costa,_ she thinks. Bruno Costa and Bobby Karnelli and Silvio Manfredi and Tandy and Ty, Mattie Franklin and the Matchstick. ( _Hope,_ her brain keeps insisting, and she knows it wasn’t Hope she found a few nights ago but Trish’s voice won’t get out of her head, and she fucking can’t with this, she really can’t—) Bruno Costa, Karnelli’s Bambino, and kids vanishing in the dark, and severed heads on hospital floors like a melon left behind on the linoleum. _Where did the head go, anyway?_ Who knows. Bottom of the river, maybe. _Getting in way too deep, Jessica._ She needs proof that Ty Johnson didn’t take these drugs, she _needs_ it, and she’ll get it however she can, just—she wants this bastard taken down. She wants him on the ground and bleeding for what he’s done to these kids.

There are still boxes of files on Trish’s dining table labeled with her name. She won’t look at them for too long. Every time she does, it feels like she’s been burned.

It’s half an hour later and her thighs are starting to buzz with the effort of holding herself up when Costa comes out of the foreman’s office with a stick-shaped guy in glasses, skinny-jeans and a thin tie and a suit-coat over his button-down. He’s older, maybe his late fifties, and it looks like she could snap him into pieces with her bare hands. _Doctor,_ Lantom had said. A guy who looks like a doctor. Maybe not the kind of doctor she’d been thinking of, not a white-coat and stethoscope doctor, but a scientist-doctor, a doctor of physics or biology or—

_Biochemistry._

Jess drops to the ground with a grunt, and slips after them into the shadows.

“It’s taking too long.” Costa’s all Staten Island, biting off vowels and nipping at consonants like an angry bulldog. “He’s getting impatient, and he’s riding my ass. You’d better have something for me instead of more of this _it takes time_ bullshit—”

“Leave off,” says the scientist. He has a funny croaky voice, like a raccoon might if it had a human voicebox. “It’s delicate work. I’ve told him this.”

“Doesn’t keep him from getting up my ass about it, Warren.”

“ _Dr._ Warren,” says Warren, eyes closed. “For the last time. _Dr._ Warren.”

“Whatever, Doc.”

There’s a clattering. One of them—Warren, she thinks, when she peers around the corner—is unlocking one of the shipping containers. Jessica can’t get a good look at which one, from this angle, can’t see the ID number. _Fuck._ “I’m doing the best that I can with the materials I’ve been given. It would be much easier if I had an actual lab, _sanitary_ procedures—”

“Could’ve had that if you hadn’t managed to get yourself kicked out of Columbia for stalking a freshman,” Costa snaps. “You work with what we give you, Warren. Damn sight better than you’d be getting in jail.”

Warren doesn’t have anything to say to this. Jessica presses her back against the cool metal of her container. When Warren heaves the door open—it sticks, with a terrible screeching sound—she bounces up on to the top of the container, and lies flat so she can get a better view. They’re inside before she can get her camera set up, but they have to come back out at some point. She settles her sweatshirt over the shiny pieces, and leans on her elbows, waiting.

Whatever they’re doing, it only takes a few minutes. Warren comes back out first. She’s certain, for a second, that he hears the click of the shutter, but then he shakes his head and pulls at his earlobe and says “Damn tinnitus,” which, thank fuck. Costa’s next. Her camera’s set up to take half a dozen frames in one go, just in case someone turns at the very last moment, and she’s fairly certain she has clear shots of both their faces, moonlight slanting over them, coming out of the container. (And, score, she gets the ID into frame this way. Hell fucking yes.) Costa says, “Should be doing better, Warren, we can’t have every single one of them die, that’s not the point,” and then Warren says, “Maybe if your boss didn’t want me to find the metaphorical Philosopher’s Stone, I’d be having better luck,” and they’re stalking off, the shipping container locked up tight behind them.

 _Philosopher’s Stone._ Isn’t that a _Harry Potter_ thing? Christ, it’s been a while since _Harry Potter._ Not the sword in the hat, the other thing. The life-enhancement thing. Fuck. She’s going to have to go and look at the damn book, and she’s pretty sure the only copy she ever had was put into storage when she went to stay with Trish. _Did we ever get it back?_ She can’t remember.

_Fuck it. Google it is._

The Philosopher’s Stone. According to Wikipedia, it’s a route to immortality. According to the _Harry Potter_ Wikia, it’s more associated with _extended_ life, and health and wellness. She waits ten minutes, until she’s absolutely certain no one will be around, and then shears the lock off with both hands.

There aren’t any lights inside, aside from a heart monitor. It casts a faint green glow over the bedspread, over the dim lab table. Jessica fiddles with her camera, and pulls the door to the container shut as best she can before it starts to scream. Every time she takes a picture, she’s blinded. Chemicals she doesn’t know the name of, a laptop that’s in sleep mode, a few books with no titles, and—

_Shit._

There’s a boy in the bed. Asian, she thinks. Not Chinese or Japanese but something mixed up between half-a-dozen other things. Lip ring and bruised eyes. He’s asleep, or—she finds the glint of an IV in the light of her phone—being kept unconscious. The bag doesn’t have any writing on it, but it smells familiar, like when she’d been stuck in the hospital and the doctors had been trying to keep her under control. There’s a set of handcuffs locked around his wrist, straps pinning him down. Jess looks back at the door to the container. “Fuck me.” She can’t exactly carry him out without being noticed, but at the same time—

 _Jess_ —

“ _Fuck_ me,” she says again, and then pulls the IV out of him as carefully as she can. The little heart monitor thing on his forefinger is easier to deal with. So are the straps holding him to the bed; she tears through those without a word, cracks the plastic brace on the bed to slip the cuffs free. He’s tiny, and thin, and his bones are poking through him like weaponry when she heaves him over her shoulder and turns to leave. Which is, of course, when her phone starts ringing, because she forgot to put it on vibrate, of _course_ —

There’s a shuffling sound from a few containers over, and Jess hits the silence call button. It’s Lewis. _Fuck._ The boy’s breathing is very faint against the back of her neck. Jessica shifts him around into a fireman’s carry, and takes a few bouncing steps before jumping, and landing hard on top of another container. A few rows down, she hears a walkie-talkie crackle and hiss. _Fuck fuck fuck._ Security guard? Who knows. She’d rather not test the idea that she’s faster than a bullet, because obviously she’s not, and just— _fuck._

 _Please don’t wake up, kid, seriously_ —

Her phone rings again. Jessica fumbles around, and answers. “ _Not_ a good time, Lewis.”

“That’s friendly,” says Lewis. Her voice is like ice. “Just wanted to be clear on something. Were you ever going to mention the fact that my client has apparently been kidnapped, or was that, you know, something you wanted me to figure out on my own?”

Jess opens her mouth, and then shuts it again. _Well, shit._ “I’ve been busy.”

“Busy enough to think that not telling me something to the effect of _you’re your client was just kidnapped_ would be a good idea?”

 _Busy enough that I forgot,_ Jess thinks, but she doesn’t say that. “Look, can I call you back? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“Really, unless you’re in the middle of having like…a freak alien baby or something I’m not all that sure—”

Somewhere nearby—and shit, that’s close, that’s _way_ too close—she hears Costa say, “What the fuck happened to the door?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jess says.

“Jessica?” The ice is gone. Lewis snaps to attention. “Jessica, tell me what’s happening right now.”

“Better for you if you don’t know,” Jess says. “I’ll call you back.”

“Jones—”

She hangs up. Down below, Warren’s shouting something. More walkie-talkie crackling. Jessica waits, breathes in and out, and then jumps to another container, and then to another. Every time she lands it makes a clanging sound like some kind of bell on Judgment Day, which is the _last_ thing she needs right now. The kid’s still passed way the fuck out. _Stay asleep, dude._ The last thing she needs is for this kid to wake up.

“Up there!”

Or to get caught, she thinks. That’s actually the last thing she needs. There’s a bang, a ricocheting screech of metal on metal that makes her ears ring, a flare of sparks. A bullet, rebounding. Jess yanks her hood up and bolts, not bothering to keep low; she jumps once, twice, and then she’s landed hard more than a hundred yards away, and the guards are way, way out of sight. Her phone’s ringing again—Lewis, probably—but she ignores it. The boy on her back (she shuffles him around until his arms are draped around her shoulders, hoisting her hands under his legs) makes a soft sound, like she’s jostled him too hard. _Yeah, well, you and me both, buddy._ She _really_ doesn’t like guns. Really. Does not. At all.

She calls Trish.

“You okay?” is the first thing Trish says, and Jess thinks, _Christ, I love you,_ because it’s not _where are you_ or _what are you doing_ or _what’s happened now_ , it’s _are you okay_ , and there’s something about that that’s strangling her in a way she doesn’t want to stop. Then she realizes what just happened, and _shit, okay._ That’s…not something she’s about to think about, right now. Trish doesn’t notice the silence. “How did Bambino go?”

“I’m, uh.” She clears her throat, because her voice is doing stupid things. “I’m at the waterfront. Can you come get me?”

“Did something happen?” Trish says, and there’s already clattering on the other end. “Jess—”

“I’m fine, just—I don’t want to carry this kid the whole way back.” She shifts her hand. “I’m gonna be at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in about fifteen minutes, okay? Just—we’ll hide around there.”

“Did you find Tandy or Ty?”

“No.”

Trish is quiet for a moment. “Should you call Claire?”

That’s…actually a really good idea. “I’ll call her. And I’ll let her know you’re coming by to get her, he might need more than I know, I know like…exactly shit about what was going on where I found him. Um.” And she needs to call Lewis back, because otherwise she’s pretty sure the nosy space case is going to peer right into a hole she probably won’t be able to come back out of. “Actually, no, tell Claire to go to the office, I’ll tell Malcolm to let her in.”

“I’m right here, Jess,” says Malcolm, and suddenly Jess realizes she’s on speaker. “I’ll wait for her.”

“You’re at the office _again_? Trish—”

“Don’t ask stupid questions right now, Jess, just—get somewhere safe. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Keep your head down.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Jess says, but Trish has already hung up. She looks at the screen of her phone for a second— _this is like the worst possible time for me to start wondering what “I love you” means, isn’t it?—_ and then heaves the kid ( _Billy the Kid, let’s go with that_ ) higher up over her shoulder.

_Keep on trucking, Jones, come on._

Trucking isn’t the best way to live her life, she’s found. Hiding under the bed usually works out better for everyone involved.

.

.

.

Claire’s basically apoplectic when Trish and Jess reappear in the offices with an unconscious boy and a camera full of probably now-illegal pictures. Not because of Jess, Jess doesn’t think (Claire keeps giving the whiskey bottles some serious side-eye, but makes no comment) but because of the whole situation. Namely, that Jessica’s office has been invaded by a crazy fucking lawyer and Malcolm’s squishy side-piece.

“Is there a particular reason,” Lewis says, in a voice that’s actually terrifyingly level, “that you’re carrying an unconscious teenager into your house with what look like broken handcuffs on his wrist?”

Shit. She’d forgotten about the cuffs. Jessica looks at Trish, and Trish looks hard at the ceiling. _Thanks a lot, Patricia._ “Don’t want to talk about it,” she says finally, and turns to Claire. “Bedroom?”

“Again? Please.” Claire rolls her eyes hard enough to burn. “Darcy, get out of the way.”

 _Fucking hell._ “You two know each other?”

“Claire’s my Commissioner Gordon,” says Lewis, like this makes any fucking sense at all. “Well, actually she helps me get drunk some weekends. I was as surprised as you were.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” snaps Jessica, and then glares at Santino, too. Santino looks _placid_ , the little shit, like this isn’t even the top of the list of weirdass things that have happened in his miniscule life. “Either of you.”

“You don’t hang up on me in questionable circumstances and expect me not to follow through. Just— _no bueno_ , Jones.” Lewis hooks her hair behind her ears. She must have just arrived; she’s still in her coat and her gloves and her scarf, even if Santino’s shed everything onto the back of Jessica’s desk chair. Which— _rude little shit, you are_. “And I’m just going to throw it out here right now, but seriously, those were very questionable circumstances.”

“Fuck off,” says Jess. She heads into the bedroom, and settles the kid down. There are lines around Lewis’s mouth that are making her think that she’s not quite as blasé about all of this as she’s pretending, but she’s really, _really_ sick of the flibbertigibbet act that Lewis has going. She has no fucking patience for it anymore. “Seriously, just—not the time.”

“So I gathered.” Lewis watches as Claire digs a penlight out of her kit, starts going through the overview. “Where’d you find him? In as vague a context as you can get, because we don’t have attorney-client privilege and I can, technically, be made to give evidence against you up until that kicks in.” She tips her head, and Jesus, she’s so _sick_ of seeing that goddamn motion, first Lewis and then Kate and now Lewis again, and just—Jesus fuck. “I mean, unless you want to hire us, in which case, have away with all the non-vague context. Some real information would be great at this point.”

Jessica shoves Santino’s coat off the back of her chair—Santino scowls, but doesn’t protest—and pulls the SD card from her camera, inserting it into the computer. “I found him. Some people shot at me. That’s it.”

“ _What_?” Trish snaps.

“Again?” Malcolm says, and Santino’s eyebrows go up. “Jess—”

“I find it interesting that that’s your first reaction,” says Lewis to Malcolm, as Trish moves to stand closer to Jess, like she’s a pit bull. Santino whistles.

“Told you this’d be fun, _la tigresa._ ”

“All of you _shut up_ ,” Claire snaps from the other room, and they snap to. Disobeying Claire Temple is never the best idea, Jess has found. Especially not in a circumstance like this.

Well, most of them shut up. Lewis rocks on her feet (she’s in boots that boost her up to a good three inches higher than usual, square toed and wedge heeled) and sticks out her gloved hand. “Darcy Lewis,” she says to Trish, who blinks a few times. “Sorry to be rambly; I’m running off of three days with no sleep and way too much coffee, so it’s a little jumbled in my head right now. Who are you?”

“None of your business,” says Jess. Trish reaches over Jess’s head, and takes Lewis’s offered hand.

“Trish Walker.”

“Oh!” Lewis blinks, and Jessica braces herself to spit (Malcolm looks ready to die) but all she says is, “You’re on the radio sometimes, right? My sister listens to your show, when she gets the chance. She’s not home a lot because she works at the DA’s office, but like—she really likes it. I keep meaning to find the website or something but I get distracted easily. Santino!”

Santino comes to abrupt attention, like he’s been caught doing something wrong. Lewis pulls off one glove, and holds it in her left hand, spitting out enough Spanish that Trish’s eyebrows actually march all the way up into her hair. Santino mutters something under his breath, shoving his hands into his pockets. Then _Claire_ shouts something from the other room, also in Spanish, and it’s just—Jess has no idea what’s going on anymore. She doesn’t even know enough Spanish to differentiate one word from the other; anything more than _tortilla, por favor_ is beyond her. Trish, though, looks highly interested, and says something of her own, and then _everyone_ is talking, and she’s…just going to download her photos, now. On the far side of the desk, Malcolm gropes for the extra chair, and sinks down into it without a word.

“I fucking hate this,” Jess says under her breath, and Malcolm digs his nails into his hair, hiding his face.

It takes another half an hour before they can get Lewis to go away, and that’s only after Jessica has explained everything—well, everything she _can_ , because she’s broken more than a few flaws already, and she doesn’t exactly have the money to hire a lawyer. She leaves Santino behind. “Do me a favor and keep him out of Claire’s hair,” says Lewis, and tugs at the ponytail frizzing out from the back of Santino’s head. He makes a _for fuck’s sake_ sort of face, but doesn’t yank away from her. “At least until she’s done working.”

“Fine,” says Jess. “Go away.”

“What are you going to do?” Trish asks. Lewis pulls her glove back on, and checks her phone. Her scarf’s slipped, and there’s a mark—a bruise, like a thumbprint, or a hickey maybe—at the base of her throat. Jessica doesn’t actually want to know which one it is. A thumbprint would make her feel guilty ( _is Lewis getting beat up? What the fuck? She doesn’t strike me as someone who would let anyone touch her like that, what would—_ ), and a hickey will just make her mad (because _god fucking dammit_ , _get that out of my face_ ). She tells herself it’s a shadow, and stares hard at the computer. “None of what we’ve told you helps Ty at all.”

“You’d be surprised,” says Lewis. “Not only is there now a possible witness/probable fellow experimentation victim in your bed, Jones—which, I mean, keep your trump cards close, right?—you’ve also just given me a million names, and _that_ is the best possible place I could start. It’s not photographic evidence that Ty was forced to take those drugs, but it’s definitely going to get the DA scratching their heads.” She rolls her eyes. “Truesmith’s bitten off more than he can chew again, charging this case. It’s gonna be a personal pleasure to rip him to itty bitty pieces in front of the judge.”

“Truesmith?”

“One of Reyes’s babies and an actual walking asshole-face,” says Lewis. Trish snorts. “Anyway, I should go start on that. It was nice to meet you. Claire! _Te llamare las tarde, carino_.”

“You’d fucking better,” Claire snaps. “I should be getting paid for all the shit I do for you people. Just saying.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Lewis says, and blows a kiss at Claire’s back. She’s out the door with one last waggle of her fingers. Trish looks down at Jess.

“She’s not as bad as you said.”

“You haven’t had her sniping at you, yet,” Jessica says, strangely irritated. “Claire, how long will it be until that kid’s awake?”

“Could be an hour, could be more, hard to tell. I can’t exactly run blood tests.” Claire sucks her teeth. “He really should be in the hospital.”

“Because the hospital’s the safest place for him, right now, considering what happened to Ty.”

“Seriously,” Claire says. “Let me _work._ ”

“This is for everyone’s sanity,” says Malcolm, and shuts the door between the main office and Jessica’s bedroom before Jessica can snap back. “Mostly mine, but everyone else matters, too. What do you want us to do, Jess?”

And in that moment, every single one of them in the room turns to look at her, soldiers looking to a general. Even Santino, fiddling with his phone the way he is, stops to look up at her, waiting for orders. It’s completely insane, and entirely overwhelming, and this is precisely why Jess doesn’t like working with people; they start looking at you and expecting answers out of you and _wanting_ things and this isn’t what she signed up for, at all, but apparently it’s what she has, and just—fuck. They shouldn’t be doing this, not with her. She just keeps fucking up.

Trish puts a hand on her shoulder.

_You are not a piece of shit._

She breathes.

“I need a name for that kid,” Jessica says. “Reynardine and Mattie might be able to help, if they see a photo. You can’t do that, Trish.”

“I can ask Reynardine,” Santino says. He slings his hands into his pockets. “He hangs out near my apartment. Lives near here, I think.”

“Try the empty lot first.”

“I’ll go with you,” Malcolm says, steadfastly not looking at Jessica. “You want more names?”

“No, get them—tell Reynardine to tell others to keep their noses clean and their heads down. Tell them to steer clear of Bruno Costa, and of that doctor, Warren. I don’t think Karnelli will be a problem anymore, but throw him in too, whatever.” She has a good six hours before she needs to meet up with Lilith and Daredevil, so… “Trish, can you stay with Claire, help her if she needs it?”

She can actually _see_ the way Trish is trying not to bite her tongue, all the words and the snippiness she’s holding back. “Jess—”

“She might need help. And someone needs to be here, in case Mattie or anyone else shows up.”

They stare at each other for a second. Then Trish blows air out her nose. “Fine. What if the kid starts blowing holes in the walls? Or—y’know.”

“Try not to get a hole blown in you? I don’t know.” That’s not an image she wants. “Just—be careful. Maybe stay out of the bedroom, let Claire take the hit.”

“Hey,” says Santino, and for the first time he looks like he could snarl, his head snapping up and his eyebrows clicking together like angry Legos. “How about you watch it, _gata_.”

“You’re in my house, kid. I’m not the one that needs to _watch it_.”

“Jessica.”

“Don’t, Malcolm.” She pulls her hood up. “I’ll have my phone.”

“Where are you going?” Malcolm tugs at the hem of his sweater, uncomfortably. “Please don’t pick another fight.”

“You’re making me sound like some juvie runaway.” Jess leaves her camera on the desk. She’s not entirely sure where she’s going to end up tonight, and she can’t afford to replace it. It’s a miracle she hasn’t smashed it today already. “I’m gonna look around and see if I can find Tandy or Ty, just—wander. As much good as that’ll do.”

“You could try the Harbor View Terrace,” says Trish, looking down at her phone. Jessica jitters to a stop.

“What’s at Harbor View Terrace?”

Trish flashes the screen at her. “Twitter says that Columbia’s Sunshine Girl just showed up. They’ve been trying to get ahold of Lilith, but—oh, wait. No. Does she usually just type _acknowledged_ or is that some kind of weird code?”

Santino, for some reason, looks absurdly pleased. It’s the last thing that Jess registers before she’s out the door.

Hell’s Kitchen—along with most of Chelsea, actually, let’s be real here—was completely and totally annihilated by everything that happened in 2012. Even years later, there are still huge swaths of the city that are just…wrecked. Harbor View Terrace used to be on the up-and-up, gentrifying out the wazoo, but now it’s an actual ghost town, skeletal buildings and tagged concrete. There’s a kid waiting near one of the chain link fences, hood tugged up over her head and bubble gum snapping between her teeth. Not Crazycakes, thankfully, but the resemblance is unsettling. “You Jones?”

“Yeah.” Jessica stops. “You one of Mattie’s?”

“I’m no one’s anything,” says the girl. She points. A few yards down the link, there’s a smoking hole, the metal twisted back like it’s been dipped in fire. “She went in that way.”

“What the hell are you doing here, still?”

“Mattie asked,” says the girl, and then she darts off. Jessica swears under her breath. Before she can shout a warning, the girl’s long out of earshot. She can only hope that she has the common sense to stay out of the way of the Maggia tonight, like everyone in the city should.

_Like I’m not going to._

God fucking damn Trish for calling her a hero, seriously. God damn Trish and God damn Luke for all of this, and Malcolm too, the three of them trying to drag her up out of her stupid hole. Just…fuck. Fucking fucking fuck.

Jess slips through the fence.

There are signs on the walls reading _DANGER: EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL._ Which is the last thing, she thinsk, as she breaks in through a window, that really needs to be added into the mix with Tandy Bowen and whatever weird things she can do with light and heat, but things are the way they are. (She checks Twitter again, hating herself a little for doing it, but Lilith hasn’t responded beyond her clipped _acknowledged_ —which, when she goes back over Lilith’s Twitter feed, isn’t exactly par for the course. She’s usually just a little more sassy about it. _Maybe she’s having a bad day?_ ) It’d be hard to track anyone down in this mess if not for the fact that Tandy’s left smears of soot where she walks, prints of her bare feet in the linoleum and of her hands in the walls, and that’s about as obvious as a gleaming neon sign. _Tandy Bowen, this way._

She would, of course, _walk_ the twelve floors up to the roof, Jess thinks. Not like she can fly, or anything.

Tandy’s sitting with her back to the brick edge of the building, gleaming like a fallen star. All the wrecked buildings and the half-finished demolitions mean there’s no real light in this neighborhood, nothing to take away from the sheer gleam of her. She’s probably the brightest thing in a three block radius. When Jess shuts the roof access door, Tandy jumps, and a streak of light darts away from her hands to vanish into the black sky.

“Go away,” she says.

“No,” says Jess. She crouches. “The pair of you have been a pain in my ass for days now. You’re not wandering off again.”

Tandy blinks, slowly. She’s been crying, Jess thinks. It’s hard to tell, with all the light coming off her, but she’s pretty sure Tandy’s eyes are red. “You stopped me from hurting him. Karnelli.”

“I mean, I also beat the shit out of him, and part of that was for you.” Jessica thinks. “Most of it was because he was being an irritating little shit, but some of it was for you.”

( _There’s a girl on the ground with her skirt rucked up and fluid leaking down her cheeks_ —)

“What are you?” Tandy curls her hands around her knees. “I saw what you did to Bobby Karnelli. And to the cell phone. Normal people can’t do that.”  

“Because you’re so normal.”

“Yeah, but I’m—this. And you’re not.”

Why is it so many people seem to think she’s a therapist? Jess blows her bangs out of her face. “Look, fucked up things happened to both of us, okay? Just—I’m older than you. Doesn’t that mean you have to listen to me?”

Tandy scowls. “Not generally.”

“Fucking figures.” She scuffs her hand through her hair. “Look, is there any way you can like—not burn me if I get closer? Or whatever?”

Something in the air pops. Tandy’s calm, maybe. Her control. She blazes, blindingly, and then wrestles it back down. “Don’t come closer.”

“Okay, glowstick, Jesus.” Her palms are sweaty. “Just—take a chill pill.”

“It’s not like I’m doing this on _purpose_ ,” Tandy says, and to Jessica’s horror she starts to cry all over again. “It’s not like I _want_ this.”

“I didn’t say you did, okay? Shit.” She stands. “Just—look, I could really use your help right now. So if you could stop, you know, pulling a supernova, that would actually be great.”

“My help?” She’s still crying, tears threading down her cheeks. “What do you need _my_ help for?”

“You found Karnelli,” Jess says. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to show me where some of the others are. The men who did this.”

Tandy shivers, scalp to toes. She’s dimming, down and down and down, and Jessica wonders— _is it her feelings? Or her focus?_ “What for?”

There’s a scrape, and a crunch, and then— _you have to be fucking kidding me_ —of course it’s them. Not Lilith and Daredevil, Lilith and Crazycakes. Crazycakes is _still_ chewing gum; she blows a bubble, and snaps it between her teeth. “Well, hey there, strangers.”

Tandy shoots to her feet. More than that, she shoots right up into the air, wavering, losing her balance, but finally hovering a good fifteen feet off the rooftop, level with the water tower that really should be drained and taken down. _Danger,_ Jessica thinks. _Explosive materials._ And then: _Ah, shit._ “Lilith.” Her voice shakes, and light flares between her fingers. “Lilith, you need to go away, you need to _go_ , I don’t know how long I can keep it under control—”

 _Oh, so burning me to a crisp would have been a better option?_ Jessica almost says, but she bites her tongue just in time, because really, that’s…not helpful. Even she can tell how much of a shitshow that would become, if she said that aloud. _Not helpful at all._

“Tandy,” Lilith says, and then again, louder, sharper: “ _Tandy_. Stop.”

“I can’t—” It’s not quite fire, Jess thinks. It’s more—it’s more like light, blazing, scorching, blinding light, bursting out of every crack of her like she’s carrying a sun inside her chest. It’s casting her face into shadow. “Lilith—”

“Take a breath.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Tandy says, and she fumbles the retreat, tumbling a little in the air as she shoots back, away from all of them. “I can’t, I can’t—”

“Breathe _,_ ” Lilith snaps, and Tandy breathes. Jess isn’t sure that _she_ can, but Tandy does, in and out, far too fast. She’s blazing like a comet, and there’s something about her expression that makes Jess think of meteorites, the crash and the burn and the crater left behind. Lilith looks back at Jess. Jess can’t make out anything in the glare, but she thinks Lilith might actually be frightened. “In and out, Tandy.”

“Don’t come near me.” Even Tandy’s tears shine, like molten gold, like thready sunlight. “I can’t control it, it just—”

She tenses right before the flash, right before there’s a burst of light from her hands that’s so blazing that Jess is going to be blinking away spots for a year. She aims it, or tries to, and the thing shoots off, skipping like a stone over water until it finally lands hard in a storage unit on the top of a building three roofs down. It bursts into flames.

Tandy screams, and hides her face in her hands again.

“Shit.” Next to Jess, Crazycakes shifts from foot to foot. “ _Shit._ ”

“Need help?” says a voice. When Jess turns around, there’s a slim figure suspended from the side of another building, sticking there with his fingers and toes. “Only she’s kinda making a mess and I think the cops are gonna be mad. They don’t like it when there are shiny things in the sky raining down terror and destruction.”

Tandy makes an awful pained sound, and light flares between her hands again.

“Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” Lilith snarls without looking around, and she sounds so much like Daredevil that Spider-Man actually flinches.

“Sorry.”

“Way to go,” says Crazycakes. Somehow, without Jess noticing, she’s nocked an arrow and drawn it back to her ear, silent and terrifying as a ghost. “You pissed off both of them in the same week.”

“It’s not like I _meant_ to crash the whole drug raid thing the first time, it just happened. There was screaming, I thought something was wrong.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure he cares much.” Crazycakes keeps the arrow up. “I’d shut up if I were you.”

Spider-Man glances up at Tandy again, and then seems to think better of whatever joke he’s about to make. “I’ll stick around for the show, if you don’t mind.”

“Do whatever you want,” says Crazycakes, “but you try _anything_ and I swear I’ll shoot you through the throat.”

“Cool. You do you, that’s—that’s cool,” says Spider-Man, and _what the fuck even is going on right now._

“Tandy.” Lilith again. “Tandy, listen, okay? I need you to listen. You need to listen to my voice, just to me right now, don’t think about any of it, don’t run. Just listen. Can you do that?”

Light flares between Tandy’s fingers again. She clenches her hands up into fists. “I don’t know if I—”

“ _Listen to me._ ”

Tandy shuts up, and stares.

“Your name is Tandy Bowen,” says Lilith. “You remember how we met? You remember how I told you that wasn’t your fault? This isn’t your fault either, not any of it. Someone’s done this to you, and we’re going to get them, all right, we’re going to figure it out, but right now I need you to breathe and to listen to my voice, just to me. I need you to try to come down to the rooftop again.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“Tandy, I need you to try. Please try. If you come down to the roof we can try to figure something out, we can try to help you, but if you stay up there you’re a target and I don’t want you to get hurt, so just—please try to come down to the roof, okay?” Lilith’s voice is wavering a little, flickering. There’s a little more north in her voice than south, and Jessica frowns, because _where the hell_ — “Try to come down to the roof, we won’t come near you, just—just come down and get out of sight for a while, because Manfredi’s men are looking for you and if they find you it’s gonna be like…Well, not Loki-level bad, but it’ll be bad, okay, so just—come down to the roof if you can manage it, we’ll figure something out, I promise you, we’ll figure out how you can control it, I just need you to come down, okay? Just come down.”

Tandy shuts her eyes and breathes, in and out, shaking, wobbling in the air. Then, like a switch has been flicked, she falls. She doesn’t levitate down, she doesn’t gradually sink down, she _drops_ , like a ribbon performer that’s had her silks cut. She shrieks, dropping like a stone, and Jess doesn’t think about it; she jumps from the roof to the water tower and rebounds, barreling into Tandy Bowen (who’s fragile, and gleaming, and screaming still) before she can break her back on the concrete. It’s like holding the desert sun in her hands. Tandy shrieks again, and when Jess hits the rooftop, they roll apart. Her hands are burned lobster-red, like bad sunburn, or like she’s touched a stovetop. Tandy isn’t floating anymore, at least. She pushes herself away, up against the lip of the building, drawing her knees up to her chest and shaking. Lilith’s boots scrape against the roof, all square heel. “Jones, Jesus Christ—”

“Fuck off,” says Jess, and hides her hands underneath her coat. “Go—go deal with the human lightbulb, I’m fine—”

“I’m sorry—” Tandy shakes her head, pushes further back into concrete. “I’m—I can’t control it, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“She’s okay,” Lilith says. She’s lying, since Jess’s hands feel like fucking hell, and she’s pretty sure blisters are popping up, but Lilith says it like it’s truth, like it’s silly not to believe her. “Tandy, she’s fine. Okay? Jess is fine. Everyone’s okay.”

“This is like TV,” says Spider-Man. He sounds terrifyingly young. Thankfully, Jess is pretty sure Tandy didn’t hear him. “Are you people with the X-Men?”

“Shut up,” says Crazycakes.

“Breathe.” Lilith crouches just out of Tandy’s reach. “In and out, okay? Match me. Just for a little bit. I need you not to panic right now.”

“I’m not panicking,” Tandy snaps, but she’s also hyperventilating, so it doesn’t come out very believable. Her face starts screwing up. “Lilith—”

“Breathe with me,” says Lilith again, and reaches out with a gloved hand. “Hey, look. You can’t burn me through these, Tandy, I promise you. Just—hold on and breathe for a bit. In and out.”

Tandy reaches out, flinches back. Then, slowly, she reaches out again. When she touches her fingertips to the center of Lilith’s palm, there’s a bubbling flicker of golden light, but there’s no scorching, no burning. Lilith doesn’t twitch. She waits until Tandy puts her hand back into reach, and then she holds on, still crouched like an awkward little crow, breathing in silence. Jess looks down at her hands—definitely blistering; Trish is going to pitch a goddamn fit—and then glares up at Spider-Man.

“Shows over,” she snaps. “Go home.”

“I mean, I think I should…probably stay just to make sure—”

Crazycakes has her arrow aimed at his mask before he can get through _probably._ Spider-Man goes scary still, just for a moment. Then he says, “Message received,” and swings off. Tandy hasn’t looked away from Lilith. They all stand there, waiting, until Tandy’s breathing steadies out, until her stranglehold on Lilith’s hand goes a bit looser. She doesn’t stop glowing. If anything, she just gets brighter.

“Where’s Ty?” she says. Her eyes are overbright. “Lilith, I just—where’s Ty?”

Lilith draws in a deep breath through her nose. Then she stands, pulling Tandy to her feet. “We were kind of hoping that you might be able to help us with that part.”

“Maybe, you know, as far away from the explosives as we can get,” Jessica says. “Just saying.”

.

.

.

It’s back to the waterfront, because the Hudson is the only place any of them can think of that won’t burn if they throw Tandy into it. Plus, Jess thinks, this all started on the waterfront, anyway. Silvermane’s men seem to haunt this place like bad memories. The waterfront is as good a spot as any.

“I was, um.” Tandy sits on the concrete with her legs swinging out over the water. She’s barefoot, and there are cuts on the soles of her feet. Nobody’s mentioned them. “We’ve been staying in that—that church you sent us to, Lilith, like we said. But a few nights ago—I don’t know. We were just out wandering around. Near Columbia. Karnelli grabbed me, and—and there were other men, too, I don’t know their names. Someone hit me in the head. And—and the first time I woke up, Ty was there, and a man, an old man, with—with an accent—”

“Bowen.” Jess swipes through her phone to a photo of Silvio Manfredi. “This the guy?”

“Mm.” Tandy draws her knees up to her chest. (“Using the light—it dims it for a while,” she’d said, and then she’d fired what looked like daggers of pure gleaming light into the Hudson for forty minutes straight. She’s just barely glowing, now, more like a nightlight than a spotlight. The air around her feels like it’s scorching, though.) “That’s him.”

She says it in a quiet way, a reserved and resigned way, a _yes, that’s the man who did this,_ as opposed to _yes, that’s the motherfucker I’m going to kill_. Still, there’s something in her eyes—Jessica’s not entirely sure Manfredi will enjoy it, if he gets into the same room as Tandy Bowen. “You hear his name?”

“People called him Silvermane.” Tandy shuts her eyes again. “I was only awake for a few minutes, Ty was—Ty was awake longer. I don’t know. And then when I woke up again, I was—um. I was like this. And Ty was gone.”

Her voice breaks. On Tandy’s other side, Lilith touches a hand to her back, like a sister, or an aunt, or a mom, brushes her fingers lightly down Tandy’s spine until Tandy relaxes a little. _Lilith’s the one that Lantom knows,_ Jessica thinks. Lilith knows Lantom. Daredevil probably knows Lantom. _Confession, my unbaptized ass._

“You said he was in the hospital,” Tandy says, turning to Jess. “You said—you said he was in a coma. But I went to the hospital, and he’s not there anymore. He’s—I can’t find him anywhere, not in any of the places he would go to hide, nowhere I know. Where did he go?”

Jessica darts a look at Lilith. Lilith, it seems, knows how to deal with people with terrible questions, at least better than she does. Lilith, though—she presses her lips together and waits. Behind her, Crazycakes (standing at attention like a meerkat) adjusts her sunglasses, and cocks her head in a question.

“Ah, shit,” Jess says, for what feels like the millionth time, and she goes over everything she knows. Not just the censored crap that she told Lewis, but _all_ of it, every piece, from wandering around and stumbling across Lilith and Daredevil to this moment, up until tonight. Tandy swallows when she mentions the Asian boy, and says, “Aaron Chord,” in a quiet voice (Lilith makes an interesting noise, like a kitten that’s been stepped on) but other than that she keeps her mouth shut until Jess finishes, until Jess gets to her feet and shoves her (definitely blistering) hands into her hoodie pocket and looks away at the river. Usually she can’t stand the waterfront. It makes her think of Kilgrave, and of Trish, and of the ending, of bone snapping between her hands. ( _Smile,_ and she won’t, she _won’t_ smile, not like that, not when she’s told, not ever when she’s told, not ever again—) Still, there’s an odd soothing quality to the lap of the water that’s steadying her out, a little.

“Anything you can tell us would be a big help, Tandy,” Lilith says, in her quiet, twanging voice. “A name, or a place, or anything. Anything you saw or heard would help.”

“I want to come with you,” Tandy says. “I want—I need to help you look for him, if that’s what you’re doing, I want to help, please, I just—”

Lilith’s lips part, and then press together again. At the same time, there’s a shift of movement in the dark behind them, scraping. Crazycakes rolls her neck, popping her vertebrae. “Dude, you’re way late.”

“Hawkeye,” says Daredevil, and Tandy leaps to her feet and skips out over the edge of the water, hovering. She only realizes she’s standing on air when she stops, and looks down at the Hudson again. Daredevil turns to Jess, and he cocks his head, too, and they’re all just…birds. They’re all birds of prey or something, she doesn’t know, but she feels like a cat that’s been sighted by an owl and she really, really doesn’t like it. “Jones.”

He doesn’t greet Lilith, but she also doesn’t seem to be expecting a greeting. When she gets up and brushes dust off the back of her uniform, she says, “Did you find them?”

Daredevil inclines his head once, and goes quiet. Lilith sucks her teeth.

“I mean, better than a punch in the tit,” says Crazycakes.

“Can someone explain what the fuck you people are talking about?” Jessica crosses her arms over her chest. “Because if you’re gonna drag me into this, I feel like I get to, you know, actually know what’s going on.”

“There’s a scientist,” Lilith says. “Miles Warren, he used to work at Columbia University in the biochemistry department. We thought it’d be a good idea to talk to him, and whoever’s working with him.”

Over the Hudson, Tandy’s gone dead white. “Warren,” she says. “He’s—um. He was there, he was the one who—the scientist. Is he the one who has—”

She can’t seem to be able to say Ty’s name anymore. Crazycakes shifts her weight, and then prowls over to stand next to Jessica, tracing her fingertips down the string of her bow like a worry stone.

“Johnson wasn’t there,” Daredevil says. “Warren doesn’t know where he is.”

“You can’t know that for sure.” Tandy wipes her eyes. “If he was lying—”

“He wasn’t.”

“You can’t know that!”

“He can, actually,” says Crazycakes, and pops her gum between her teeth. “And before you think to ask, you know, don’t ask.”

Daredevil’s mouth twists. Jessica gets the feeling he wants to smack Crazycakes upside the head. Lilith shifts until she’s standing at his shoulder, and says, “Did you get an address, at least?”

“A few. He has three labs.”

“Had three labs,” Lilith corrects, absently, and there’s just a moment where Jessica’s stomach drops down into her shoes, because _Jesus, did Daredevil kill someone?_ “Did he say what Manfredi wanted?”

“Wouldn’t happen to be an army, would it?” Jess says, and Daredevil goes shivery still. He looks at Tandy, and then at Lilith again, before turning to Jess. Which is—not all that great, having his full focus, because it’s making all the hair on her body stand up. She wants to spit like a cat and punch him in the face.

“That was part of it.” He folds his arms over his chest. “Some of the children were test cases for heightening mutant abilities. According to Warren, that was only the first wave. The second part was more focused around regenerative drugs. Mutant genetics laced with spiked MGH.”

“What, like—freaking _Harry Potter_?” Lilith’s lips thin out. “Are you fucking telling me that all of this was because Silvio Manfredi’s scared of _dying_?”

“Hard to tell without asking him.”

“And I’m gonna ask him, believe me.” Lilith kicks a pebble into the Hudson. “It’ll be fun. You hold him down, and I’ll ask.”

“So what’s the plan, kiddos?” Crazycakes rocks on her feet again. “I mean, I know you were gonna do that thing later, but schedule’s changed. And plus, Tandy.”

Tandy dips in the air like she’s been whacked with a tennis racket. Then she shoots back up again. “I’m not staying behind,” she says, her voice trembling. “Not if you’re looking for Ty.”

Lilith pinches the bridge of her nose for a moment. Her eyes are green, Jess realizes suddenly. Not blue, but green. “We won’t be able to hit more than one of the labs before they realize what’s going on, not unless we split up. Which, no, Tandy. You’re not leaving my sight.”

“But—”

“ _No._ ”

Tandy shuts her mouth up tight. It might be Jessica’s imagination, but she looks a little bit relieved. “Okay.”

“I can take one.” Crazycakes pulls an arrow from her quiver, and spins it between her fingers. “I have some more net arrows. And a smoke bomb if necessary.”

“47th and 11th,” is all Daredevil says. “Don’t let them see you.”

“Like I ever let anyone see me, Aramis,” says Crazycakes. She salutes with her bolt before darting away between the buildings. Nobody says goodbye. He’s still staring at Jessica like he’s waiting for her to explode, hands tense. _The fuck is Aramis,_ she thinks, and glares right back at him.

“If you’re gonna tell me to go home,” she says, “fuck off.”

“Because that’s the plan,” Lilith says. “I sent you a nice note and everything just to tell you turn around and go home when things finally start getting interesting.”

“Can you not use Crazycakes as a delivery girl? If you want to talk to me, you talk to me, don’t pull this messenger pigeon bullshit.”

Lilith makes a noise like a squashed cat again. “Duly noted. What are the other two labs?”

“One’s containment,” Daredevil says. “One’s experimentation. Likelihood is Johnson’s at experimentation. But containment has most of the kids.”

 _Fuck._ Devil’s bargain. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

“Where are they?” Lilith drops a hand to the holster on her leg, tracing her fingers over her stun gun. It might be a thoughtless habit. “In relation to each other.”

“Six blocks apart.”

She sucks her teeth. “Tandy’s with me. Jones?”

“I’m not going with you,” Jessica says, staring at Daredevil. Daredevil stares back at her, jaw clenched. “Not in the mood.”

“Can we be friendly, please,” Lilith says, in a tightly leashed voice. Her accent’s completely out of control. “Jones, you come with me too. If Ty’s there, you’re going to need to ask him questions, get evidence for whatever investigation thing you have going. We go to experimentation first, and then you split off to containment, hit them before they can hear anything. Same direction?”

“Roughly.”

“Then we shouldn’t need to time it.” Lilith tips her head at him. Daredevil tips his back. “Unless you have a better plan.”

Daredevil doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “There were more guards than there should have been at experimentation.”

“You think they have kids they’re working on?”

“Possibly.”

“And the third lab?”

“Research and development,” Daredevil says, and Lilith sneers.

“Bastards. How many guns?”

“Didn’t get a good look.”

“Gao?”

“Not quite. Close.”

“This should be fun, then. Containment?”

He shakes his head.

“Even more fun. You sure?”

“About experimentation or containment?”

“Containment. And—”

“She’ll be fine.”

“Not just worried about her.”

“Don’t.”

“Sure, Jude,” Lilith says, and Jess feels like a ping-pong ball, knocked back and forth between two rackets, because this conversation is _way_ too fast, all half-phrases and unexplained trail-offs. “You good?”

“Not really.”

“Figured as much.” Lilith looks back at Jessica. “What about you, you good with the plan?”

“There’s a plan?” Jessica says, but she trails after them anyway. Tandy touches back to ground again, stumbling, and follows.  

Crazycakes is at 47th and 11th. Experimentation is at 44th and 10th, in the basement of an old office building. When Lilith asks about containment, Daredevil points northeast, and doesn’t say anything else. It’s incredibly weird to watch, Jessica thinks. She can’t help but think about when she’d broken into the closed club with Luke, or when she and Trish had gone to St. Patrick’s. There’s an odd, mesmerizing flow to how Daredevil and Lilith circle around each other. Tandy sees it too, she thinks, stealing a look at the sunspot. The pair of them only seem to be talking as an afterthought, communicating through half-aborted gestures, pointing and leaning and throwing words at each other like “Angles?” “Third floor.” “Numbers?” “Thirteen.” Which make _no sense at all_ to anyone outside of whatever weird little code thing they have going. It’s incredibly frustrating to listen to. Jess kind of wants to throw them both over the edge of the roof, because _Jesus_.

“You want top?” Lilith says, and Jess only realizes she’s talking to her when Lilith turns, her eyes crinkling, and says it again.

“I’m pretty sure that’d involve like…seven floors of nothing, so, no.”

“Third floor’s where the guards start, he says.” Lilith crouches on the edge of the building. “So only a few.”

 _Oh. Third floor down. Where the guards are? What the fuck._ “And how the hell would he know?”

Daredevil doesn’t say a word. There’s an angle to his mouth that’s almost a smirk.

“Mysterious superhero bullshit,” Jess snaps. “Doesn’t make sense for the pair of you to take the basement if he’s fucking off. I’ll go below.”

Lilith looks up at Daredevil again, just for a moment. “Kind of want to hit someone anyway. You two stay here and make sure nobody comes out the basement door.”

“There’s a basement door?”

She points at a shadow in a shadow, the edge of a railing and the top of a staircase. “There.”

How the fuck she saw that in the dark, Jessica has no idea. Still, she nods. “Fine. Tandy, come with me.”

Tandy gives Lilith a terrified glance. Then she puts her shoulders back. “Okay.”

Lilith squeezes Tandy’s hand as she goes by.

If _third floor_ means where the guards start, Jessica thinks, as she drops off the seventh floor of the fire escape to land hard on the sidewalk, then _thirteen_ probably means how many there are. Tandy wobbles down to the ground behind her, her bare toes very pale and shimmery against the cracked asphalt. Daredevil and Lilith get thirteen guards between them, which, considering the amount of bullshit they’ve probably pulled since Fisk, is probably status quo for the pair of them. Still, it’s…weird. And they act weird. They act, Jess realizes, like people who know each other very well, which—she kind of expected that, you _get_ relationships like that when you get thrown into close quarters and shitty situations with someone, but this is more than a battle-torn alliance that’s settled into a rhythm. This is the kind of shit that always happens when people have their own goddamn bubble, and no one else can understand their weird half-telepathic communicative bullshit.

Which leaves Jess in the cold a little bit, but it’s not like she wanted to work with them in the first place _anyway._

“I’m sorry,” Tandy says, when they’ve set themselves up in the shadows by the basement staircase. “I mean. About your hands, I’m sorry. And—and for what happened at Columbia.”

Jess doesn’t look at her palms. “’sfine,” she says, staring hard at a broken window. “Don’t care.”

Tandy bites her lip. Her hair’s a mess, all oil and grime, but it’s still pale as cotton. “Still.”

“Forget it, okay?”

“But I hurt you,” says Tandy, teary.

“I’ve been hurt worse.”

Tandy shuts up after that, thank fuck. Jess can’t meet her eyes.  

There’s silence, for a handful of terrible minutes. Nothing but the noises of the city, the honk of a taxi a few blocks off, the hum of a passing car. Then glass shatters, and _Jesus Christ_ , that’s a _body_ , someone’s flung someone out the window and into a dumpster a few windows down. Tandy shrieks and muffles it behind her hands in the same moment, flaring yellowy-white. Jess doesn’t go to look—her heart’s kicked up to rabbit speed, and _Jesus Christ_ , could you not _warn_ a girl before you go flinging people out of windows? It’s on the second floor, not too far to fall. “Fucking hell.” She can only hope no one in the neighborhood heard that. Not that it’s uncommon to have breaking glass in Hell’s Kitchen, but just—fucking hell.

A few minutes later there’s a muffled bang, a pistol shot through windows and walls, and Tandy jumps again, flares again. Jess hisses through her teeth. “Chill with the light, glowstick.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Tandy snaps back, but at least she’s pissy and not teary. Jessica’s good with pissy.

“Yeah, well, figure it out, because you’re a freaking beacon right now and attention is the last goddamn thing we need.” She looks at the dumpster again. “Well, more attention than we’re already getting.

Tandy purses her lips, and squeezes her eyes so tightly shut that it looks like she’s constipated. One heartbeat, two. The light starts dimming, in spurts and stops, like arterial spray. She reins it in as close as she can get, and it’s brighter than Jessica would like, but it’s still a lot dimmer than it was.

A few minutes more. Then there’s a clatter, a click, and at the base of the stairs, the door swings open. “In,” Daredevil says, low and rasping, and they dart inside without a word. Lilith’s nowhere in sight. “Anyone see you?”

“No thanks to Miss Lantern,” Jess says. Tandy doesn’t react. She’s clasping her hands together and drawing them apart again, like she’s playing a game of cat’s cradle, “Where’s Lilith?”

“Playing,” he says, and then there’s a crash. A second door on the far side of the room just _blasted_ inward, Lilith landing in the wreckage of the wood, and Jesus _Christ._ Neither of these two have any chill ever. Lilith rolls her body up like a gymnast, rocking back and snapping to her feet, and then goes into a low swerving kick that slams the guard—and it _is_ a guard, with a broken nose and bloody lip and a fairly impressive mark around his eye like he’s been clocked with a lamp—to his knees. Lilith doesn’t bother with the taser; she seizes a piece of wood from the broken door, and whacks the guy in the head like she’s swinging a baseball bat. Tandy makes another little stifled screechy noise, and turns her back. Daredevil doesn’t say a word, but he’s doing that clench-jaw thing again that Jess figures means he’s either pissed or he has a burr in his armored condom suit. Either way, it’s unsettling.

“You call that playing?” Jess says, as Lilith heaves a breath, and then two, and throws the plank aside.

Daredevil ignores her, slipping away. Lilith is cursing, soft and vicious and very, very Southern. Blood trickles from the corner of her lip. She swipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing it across her cheek. “ _Fuck_.” She digs the toe of her shoe into the downed behemoth. “Fucking little shit.”

Daredevil turns his face towards Jess, just for a moment—not full on, just enough to let her know he knows she’s watching—before he pulls off one glove and touches his forefinger and thumb to Lilith’s cheek. Jess blinks, and then blinks again. _Oh_. The way Daredevil had looked at Jess in the warehouse, when she’d driven the sniper down to the grating in the moment before Lilith was shot, the stillness and the consideration of it, that makes so much more sense now. _Oh._ They’re together. She’s heard rumors about Daredevil and Lilith since they first started doing the _stalk the night, beat up bad guys_ thing— _everyone_ has heard rumors of Daredevil and Lilith actually being Daredevil-and-Lilith _—_ but at the same time she’s pretty sure nobody’s ever had proof. Lilith freezes like she’s been caught in carbonite. Her eyes dart to Jess. Then, all at once, she relaxes, and leans back into the touch. 

“You okay?” She can barely hear him, he’s speaking so softly. Tandy hasn’t noticed. “You don’t usually go down that hard.”

“I’m fine.” Daredevil puts his thumb to her split lip and lets it rest, just for a moment. This isn’t the vigilante Jess is used to seeing, not the monster hiding in the dark. This is someone very different. Lilith seems familiar with him, though, if the way she reaches out and hooks two gloved fingers into one of the hard armor plates of his uniform is any indication. _There goes any possibility that they don’t know each other outside of beating the shit out of people. Fucking telepathic whatevers._ “He hit harder than I thought he would. What about you?”

“I’m all right,” says Daredevil, and Lilith snorts.

“Yeah, sure you are, Mr. Macho. I saw you get clipped.”

“I’ll live.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll remind you that you said that when you start complaining.”

The curve to Daredevil’s mouth might actually be a smile, and _Christ_ , this is weird. Jessica firmly turns her back, and says, “Glowstick, quit with the panic attack, we don’t have a lot of time.”

“I’m not panicking,” Tandy snaps. “I’m thinking.”

“Yeah, well, think more quietly, it’s not working for the rest of us.” By the time she turns around, Daredevil’s fixed his glove back on, and turned away. When Lilith looks to Jess, there isn’t a trace of embarrassment on her face. Jess has no idea what to say.  

“C’mon.” Lilith cocks her head towards the door. “We might wanna hurry before they send reinforcements. And you,” she adds, “need to scoot.”

Daredevil doesn’t say another word. He just leaves, taking the basement stairs a few at a time. By the time Jess goes to shut the door behind him, he’s vanished into the dark.

“Is he usually like that?” Tandy says. Lilith blinks at her.

“Like what?”

 _Completely fucking insane,_ Jess thinks. Tandy says, “Um, that…grumpy.”

“He’s had better nights,” Lilith says. “Tandy, I want you behind me. Jones, will you go in back?”

“I don’t take orders.”

Lilith’s lip is still bloody. It’s bothering her, for some reason. “Would you _please_ watch our backs, then? You’re the one who’ll be able to stop an onslaught if you need to.”

She can’t exactly say anything to that without sounding like a complete and total asshole. But, you know, she’s…herself. “Whatever.”

Tandy looks from one of them to the other, and swallows audibly. Lilith’s mouth starts twitching like she’s trying desperately not to laugh.

“Whatever,” she says back, and takes the lead. “Tandy, you’re floating.”

The light actually turns a little pink. “It hurts my feet less.”

“You do you,” says Lilith, and steps over the unconscious guard. “This way.”

There are more unconscious guards this way. They pick over them, past them. Well, Lilith does. Tandy floats over them. Jess steps on them, because seriously, she can’t really be bothered to jump, especially with her broken nose. The basement’s a maze, temporary walls and balsa-wood doors, rooms that are empty aside from medical equipment and handcuffs on beds. Tandy’s shaking, buzzing, the light jittering around her skin. “Chill, lightning bug,” Jess says again, much more quietly, and Tandy looks at her before breathing through her nose, dimming again. “There’s no one here.”

“Nah,” says Lilith. “Five left.”

“Five guards or five prisoners?”

“One prisoner, three guards, one megalomaniac.” Lilith prods another guard aside. “Nowhere for them to run, really. We jammed the elevators.”

“Nice of you,” Jess says.

“Yeah, well, they locked themselves in, so.” Lilith waves at a door. “If you could do the honors.”

Finally, Jess thinks. She gets to _break_ something. She looks at the door—much heavier than the others, thick wood, three locks—and then she winds up and kicks it as hard as she can hear the knob. It splinters. Another hard kick, and it comes right off the hinges. Lilith’s already seized Tandy—and Jess, Jess realizes, as a hand closes hard around her elbow—and dragged them out of the way as inside, someone opens fire. Four shots and then silence.

“Come out,” says an accented voice, and Jess stills. _Manfredi._ “I tire of your games.”

There’s no other way in, Lilith had said. But there’s also a breaker down the hall. Jess presses herself to the wall, inches her way down.

“I’ve heard so much about the pair of you,” Manfredi says. Tandy’s shaking again. “About Daredevil and Lilith. So much about your recklessness. But you’re too frightened to face me?”

She flips the breaker, and the lights go out. Tandy’s glowing, and they can’t help that, but the whole place is black, pitch dark. There’s a rush of movement, of footsteps. Jess bolts past Tandy into the room. Her night vision is shit, but she can at least make out figures. Slender, silver hair. Manfredi. He vanishes in the next moment. A gun goes off, a flare of sparks and noise. It misses, but there’s a crease of heat, of blood threading down her cheek, and Trish is actually going to kill her. Jess crashes hard into the guard with her shoulder, full quarterback mode, and when he hits the ground she elbows him in the face hard enough for his nose to break. When she punches him in the head, he goes still.

“ _Get down_ ,” a woman shouts, and it could be Lilith or it could be Tandy, but it’s a woman, and so Jessica obeys. It’s probably Tandy, because in the next second there’s a rush of light and heat that actually ruffles the hair on the back of her head, a blaze that’s so blinding that the room looks like the inside of the sun. Then it dies. With one last crackle from Lilith’s taser, the whole room goes quiet.

Tandy sputters a little, and builds a ball of light between her hands. It sticks to itself, clinging like honey. She doesn’t let go of it, but it does gleam, soft and yellow, like an actual lantern, casting pools of light over everything. At the back of the room there’s a bed, a heart monitor and straps, and Silvio Manfredi is standing by it with a knife to Ty Johnson’s throat.

“Well,” he says, panting. There are tears streaking down his cheeks from the light. “That’s interesting, isn’t it.”

Tandy heaves a breath. She nearly loses control of her ball, or, at least, that’s what Jess thinks is happening when the thing contorts. Then it lengthens, sharpens, and it’s a fucking _blade_ , it’s a dagger of light. “Let him _go_ ,” she says. “Or this goes in your head.”

Her voice is shaking. _Scared._ Jessica shifts on top of her guard, and slides off him, still crouched, low, thinking. He has a gun on his hip, but she just…leaves it. She really doesn’t want to put her prints on it. On Tandy’s far side, Lilith takes one step, and then two, before stopping by Tandy’s elbow. The other guards are unconscious, she thinks. For the most part. One or two of them might wake up in the next ten minutes, but hopefully in the next ten minutes, this will all be over.

_Unless it all goes to shit like it normally does, Jessica._

“Tandy Bowen,” says Manfredi. “He’s who you came for, isn’t he?”

“Let him _go_ ,” Tandy says again. Fire’s creeping into her voice. “Let him go _now._ ”

“Oh, Tandy,” says Silvermane. “You really are truly terrible at negotiation.”

“Three against one, Manfredi.” Lilith straightens. Jess stands, too, because yeah, technically, there are three. She’s popped some of her blisters, and her hands are _burning_. “There’s no way you can come out of this that’s good.”

“But I don’t care if I kill him.” Manfredi presses the knife closer in to Ty’s throat. Tandy keens. “Apparently, it matters to you if he winds up dead.”

Broken glass cracks under Lilith’s boots. She doesn’t put away her taser. “You don’t want to push me,” she says. It’s a very odd voice, very low, rolling and crooning and creepy as hell, something that makes the hair stand up on the back of Jess’s neck. “You don’t want to push any of us, Manfredi.”

“So I’ve heard.” He’s mussed and furious, Jess thinks, the lines around his mouth more anger than terror, but there’s something in his eyes, curling. Fear, maybe. He’s looking for an escape route. “My daughter had nothing but terrible things to say about you.”

Lilith stops. She opens her mouth, and closes it again. “Your daughter?”

“She hasn’t forgiven you for your archer bitch shooting her man,” says Manfredi. “She’s worse than me, when someone touches her things. You’ll want to keep an eye out.”

“Lilith,” says Tandy, because Manfredi keeps pressing the knife in closer, and there’s blood, and the light, it’s turning brighter, higher and higher. “ _Lilith_.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Lilith takes a step closer. “Put the knife down.”

“Let me go,” Manfredi says. “Then he lives.”

“Hey, asshole,” Jess says, and this time Manfredi snaps to her. His eyes are silvery, greyish-blue, and just…cold. It feels like she’s being coated in frost. “Seriously, what is it with you people and _talking_? Just—shut up, and put the knife down, and maybe I don’t rip your spine out your throat.”

He frowns. “You,” he says, and then stops, like he’s thinking hard. “You were at the benefit.”

“Just to see you.” She flexes her hands, ignoring the scream of raw skin. “Leave him alone, you’ve fucked them all over enough.”

“You think these people _matter?_ ” Manfredi shakes his head. “They’re trash. Nobody’s noticed them missing, nobody’s noticed them gone. They have a purpose, here, a meaning beyond their scraping, miserable lives. I gave you a purpose,” he says, and this time it’s to Tandy, who’s shaking her head, her lips trembling. “I gave you those abilities. I made you what you are.”

“Tandy.” Lilith shifts again, and stops when the knife digs in. “Tandy—”

“I can’t,” Tandy says. “I could hit Ty.”

“You’re a smart girl, Tandy Bowen.” Silvio Manfredi bares his teeth. “I looked you up, after you escaped. You know exactly what you are, and where you came from. You never would have amounted to anything, the wallflower daughter of a grasping fashionista, never quite good enough, never pretty enough, never quite up to scratch—”

“Shut up,” Tandy says.

“And then you left,” Manfredi says, with the sort of relish that makes Jess think of a snake eating a rat. “You left, and you turned into something even less than that. What I’ve given you, it’s made you something _beyond_ what you were, digging through the garbage like a rat for your food, running from whatever it was that frightened you, whatever it was that proved you a coward, I gave you that. You owe me for that.”

“Tandy, don’t listen to him,” Lilith says, but Tandy doesn’t say a word.

“You owe me, Tandy,” says Manfredi. He’s loosening his grip on the knife. When Lilith crosses to stand behind Tandy, he doesn’t seem to notice. “You owe me everything that you are now. You’re my creation. You’re one of the few strong enough to survive. I can help you learn to—”

There’s a pop. Then wind; cold; darkness. The inexorable pull of a black hole. All the air is sucked out of the room in a second, and Jess is gagging. The knife’s gone. Manfredi opens his mouth wide, like he’s about to scream, and then he’s gone. Ty clenches his hands, lets out a noise like tearing metal, and rolls out of the wrecked bed, drawing the blanket over himself. Everything muffles. Then, just as suddenly, it’s silent again, the room. There’s only her heartbeat in her ears.

“Well,” Lilith says. The words echo, oddly. “That’s…one way to do that.”

Ty gags, like he’s going to puke.

“Is he dead?” Jess hooks her hands into her pocket. “Only, you know, it’d be nice to actually have proof that all of this was his fault.”

“He’s alive,” Ty says. She’s never heard him speak before. It’s crawling, creeping. Like there’s shadow in the words. “I can feel him. He can’t get out. He—” His forehead creases. “I could let him out. But—no.”

“Maybe later.” Lilith swallows. “Maybe, um. Later.”

Tandy’s stopped floating. Glass sings under her feet as she stumbles. Her voice cracks. “Ty.”

Ty jerks his head up, and goes prey-still, terror-still. When Tandy takes another step, he flinches away. “Get her out of here,” he says, not to Tandy but to Lilith. His eyes—black holes, emptiness—snap to Jessica, and then back to Lilith. “Get her _out of here._ ”

Tandy jerks like she’s been hit. “Ty, _no—_ ”

“I can’t control this.” He puts a hand to his throat. “I d-d-don’t know if I can control this, I can’t—”

“Ty—”

Ty presses his back up against the wall. “Don’t come near me.”

Tandy shakes her head. “Don’t, please—”

“You c-c-c-can’t come near me,” Ty says, and scrambles back away from them, pressing himself into the corner. He’s pulled the blanket close around himself, like a cloak. “I’ll—it’s t-t-too hungry, I c-can’t stop it, it’ll swallow you whole and I c-can’t—”

Tandy flares so bright that it’s like a supernova, blazing, a star caught in the basement dark. “ _Screw that_ ,” she says, in her fire voice. “ _Fuck_ that, Ty, I’m not leaving, I thought you were dead, I’m not leaving you here—”

“I can’t kill you!” Ty shouts at her. There’s something blacker than darkness boiling inside his mouth. “I can’t—get _out_ —”

“Tandy,” says Lilith, but Tandy shakes her hand off.

“I’m not leaving him!”

“Bowen, seriously—”

“Fuck _off_ , Jones—”

Ty opens his mouth to shout, and then he heaves. His body snaps again, his arms tight over his stomach, bending at the waist like he’s going to puke. Darker than dark, and the air’s not boiling, it’s chilling, it’s fading, it’s turning into nothing, and there’s snakes of absolute shadow—not shadow, but night—not night, but space—not space, but the empty places between the stars, and it’s curling off his skin and cutting holes in the air, the utter absence of everything. In the same moment, Tandy _flares_ , light beyond white, and Jessica stumbles back and away as her right side sears and starts to smoke. Lilith seizes her by the wrist and drags her away, behind one of the laboratory desks, panting hard and a bruise blooming purple at the corner of her mouth. It’s too bright, like a flash grenade, and no matter how much Jessica blinks she can’t clear her eyes of spots, there’s fire and darkness and shadow and screaming, howling white, and then all of a sudden there isn’t. It’s as if someone pulled a plug out of a light socket, and a lamp went out. Lilith squeezes her fingers tight around Jessica’s wrist, her throat working. Then, slowly, the pair of them peer over the top of the desk.

Ty Johnson and Tandy Bowen are both standing, panting, staring at each other from a good six yards apart, and there’s…nothing. Between them, there’s nothing, no blazing light, no swallowing emptiness. There are sooty marks on Ty’s hoodie from the light, and the blankets in charred pieces around his feet, but other than that, no. Not the absence of everything, just…normality. Nothing.

“Holy shit,” says Lilith, and it’s Lewis’s voice coming out of her. Lewis, not Lilith, snappy vowels and odd slurred consonants, and everything—literally everything she’s seen over the past few days, it all clunks into place in Jessica’s head, and _fucking hell._ The boots, and the tipping, and the thing with Lewis always leaving her gloves on, scars, and _oh my god._ All of that makes sense now. _Fucking hell._ And Murdock, with the tipping, and _Bishop—_ “Holy fucking shit.”

“Oh my god,” says Tandy, and she bolts. Ty’s still barely on his feet when she barrels into him, and they both stagger, a mess of limbs and words. “Oh my god, you’re okay, I couldn’t find you, I woke up and you were gone, I couldn’t _find_ you—”

Ty can’t seem to keep his hands in one place, touching Tandy’s face, her throat, her shoulders and her back and her ribs. The blanket falls to the floor. It’s a clash of light and dark, and it almost hurts to look at, the spark of Tandy Bowen fading into the shadows of Ty Johnson, but for some reason Jess can’t quite look away. (She wants to, because, awkward. But she can’t yet.) “Tandy.” He presses his hands to her hair and starts to shake. “Jesus Christ—”

“ _Don’t you ever do that again_ ,” Tandy snaps, and then looks surprised at herself, like she’s not used to being so loud. Much lower and faster, she says, “Don’t you ever do that again, Ty, don’t you ever vanish again, _don’t_ —”

“You’re okay,” Ty says again. He’s not stuttering. “You’re okay, I thought—” Some horrified, frustrated look flickers over his face, and he seizes Tandy by the shoulders. “I told you to leave, you can’t—you should have left when I told you to run, I could have killed you, the emptiness, it—it eats _everything,_ you have to promise me that you won’t—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Tandy says, and then she’s bounced up onto her toes and kissed him and yeah, Jess is definitely looking away now. Lilith catches her eye. She looks a little shellshocked, still, but she’s smiling a little as she lets go of Jessica’s wrist. 

“So,” she says. “I’m guessing Ty’s testimony will help with your evidence.”

Jess rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”  

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Four days pass.

Trish is capital p pissed off that she missed the whole thing. “You could have called me,” she says, the morning after when she’s finally through with lecturing Jess in that calm, awful way that makes her feel like she’s gone around killing puppies or something a la Cruella de Ville or Jeri Hogarth. “I would have come to help.”

“There was kind of a lot going on.”

“I’m here to _help_ , Jessica.” Trish purses her lips. “I thought, you know, that—that we were in this together, I thought—”

Jessica can’t look at her, not really. “Don’t be stupid,” she says. Trish stops talking. “Of—don’t be stupid.”

There’s a moment of silence. Trish settles next to her on the edge of the desk, pushing her shoulder into Jessica’s, and it hits her again, the whole _what does “I love you” mean anyway right now._ She shoves it back, because that shit? That’s _way_ more complicated than she needs right now.

Still, when Trish takes her hand, she doesn’t pull away.

The kid in Jessica’s bed turns out to be Aaron Chord, just like Tandy said. Claire peels him away to the hospital the morning after Manfredi’s mysterious disappearance is mentioned on the news. (“He _ate_ him?” Trish says, both intrigued and revolted, and Jess tells her, “I dunno, but he could spit him back up if he wanted apparently,” and Malcolm says, “This is _grotesque_ ,” and the conversation ends.)

Hogarth calls her the morning after that with another job, “If you’re not too busy running away from me to take it, Jessica,” and Jessica snorts but takes the job. It’s very simple. Get proof of theft. Spousal issue. Kind of boring, if she’s really honest, but it’s, you know, there. And money is a thing.

She doesn’t see Lilith. She hears from the law firm, once. Murdock. “The DA,” he says, in a quiet, satisfied way, “has officially dropped all charges.”

“Good for you, then,” Jessica says. “I don’t get a thank you?”

“I think your thank you is coming in the mail in the next few days.” Murdock’s _amused_ , the fucker. He doesn’t hang up, though, not right away. “You—uh.”

“Spit it out.”

“Be careful,” he says after a moment. “And—tell us. If you need help.”

Jessica’s heart jerks in her chest, hard and uncomfortable. “Like if I need legal help?” she says, trying her level best to be as smooth as possible, but it really doesn’t work, because it sounds like she’s just swallowed whiskey wrong and it’s so _obvious_ , Jesus. “Because I’m pretty sure I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“We seem to be taking most of our payment in pie right now,” Murdock says. “So it should work out.”

“Yeah, right.”

She hangs up without a goodbye, because what the hell else is she supposed to say, anyway?

But yeah. Four days later. She kind of circles bars after she finishes a case, avoiding Luke’s old place with the tenacity of a pit bull. Josie’s is somewhere she’s been before, but not in a while—she may, possibly, have been in a fight here, and Josie does not take kindly to people who get into fights in her bar—so when she slips in with her hood up, nobody gives her a second glance.

She’s halfway through her second whiskey and typing out a text to Trish ( _I’m in a bar, not your style_ ) when someone says, “Fancy seeing you here.”

Jessica jerks so hard she nearly knocks over her glass of whiskey. Lilith—Lewis?—Lilith is watching her. Her hair’s caught up in a high ponytail, and there’s that bruise on the side of her throat. _Definitely_ a hickey. She hasn’t even tried to cover it up. _Well, that settles the “do they worry about people knowing” question._ She puts her scarred hand on her hip. “You look like someone spit in your drink. Which, let’s be honest, depending on how much you’ve pissed Josie off lately, that’s a realistic possibility.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“You’re in my watering hole, lady. I think I’m the one who should be asking the questions.” She gestures at the grumpy-ass trucker-woman behind the bar. The parrot on top of the television shrieks something insulting in Spanish. “Josie, can I get the balls, please?”

Josie makes a noise like a pissed-off Doberman, and then slams a bucket full of billiard balls on the counter. She whacks a thing of vodka down, too, and stalks off to start swearing at the TV remote again. Lewis cocks an eyebrow at Jess, and lifts the bucket a little in a question.

“No,” says Jess, flatly.

“Your loss. I was gonna fleece you.”

Jess snorts. “Like fucking hell you were.”

“Prove me wrong, then.”

It’s such an obvious play. Jess still slides off her stool, whiskey in hand. “Show me where I get to beat your ass, then, Lewis.”

“In the back,” Lewis says, and leads the way to a closed-off nook that Jessica has never noticed before. The pool table is ratty as shit, old as George Washington and probably about as brittle, but the cues are still good. Lewis sets up the balls inside the triangle, leaving her vodka unattended at the bottom left pocket. When Jess offers her a pool cue, silent, Lewis takes it with her scarred hand. “What are we even betting?”

“You have money?”

“Not really.”

“Booze, then,” says Jessica. “Whoever wins buys.”

Lewis nods. “So,” she says, once they’ve flipped a coin and Jess has earned first whack at the billiard balls. (She’d cheated.) “You’re not even gonna say anything?”

“Am I supposed to say something?” Number three rolls off into a fucking impossible corner, and Jess sighs through her nose. “Other than _you people are fucking crazy_?”

“You said that before.”

“And look at that, I’m still right.”

Instead of getting pissy, Lewis grins at her like she’s just won a prize. _Really fucking crazy_ , Jess amends, and shoots again. She misses by a bare half an inch. Lewis shifts back out of her way as Jess passes, the way a cat might. “It’s _really_ fun to talk to you, you know that?”

“Yeah, if you like your pancreas being yanked out through your nostrils.” Lewis sinks a ball, and Jess scoffs between her teeth. “You’re cheating.”

“Nah, I’m just talented.” She circles around to the other side of the table. “But seriously. It’s like walking in a minefield, but one with a decent sense of humor. It’s kinda great.”

“Something is really fucking wrong with you.”

“So I’ve been told.” She lines up the shot, and sinks a second ball. “I was kind of expecting a PI to have more questions about this.”

“Believe it or not, the pair of you aren’t that hard to figure out.” Lewis misses the next shot. Possibly because Jess accidentally-on-purpose smacks her foot against the leg of the table. Lewis gives her a filthy look, but doesn’t call her on it. “Not once you look at it right. Surprised no one else has figured it out yet.”

“Helps that a lot of people don’t actually know how to look,” says Lewis, which is…more accurate than not. Jess whacks the three out of the corner.

“If you’re here to threaten me into not saying anything, I don’t exactly have anyone to tell.”

“Don’t you?” says Lewis. She lifts her eyebrows. The scar on the back of her hand is pale and thready in the red light. “Seemed like you had more than a few people to mention it to.”

“I’m not going to.”

“I didn’t think you were.” Her lips curl. “I trust you.”

Jessica sinks the seven, and then misses her next shot. (That may, also, be on purpose.) “Whatever, Lewis.”

They go a few more rounds in silence.

“Where are—um.” Jess clears her throat. “Lightning Bug and the Glowcloud. You seen them?”

“Once.” Lewis leans on the edge of the pool table. “They’re—working on it. They’re back at St. Patrick’s. You could probably go and visit, if you liked.”

“Don’t like churches.”

“Of course you don’t.” Lewis watches her with heavy-lidded eyes. “I think Tandy wants to see you, though. She asked about you, last night.”

And she has no idea what to say to that. Jess says nothing at all.

“You know,” Lewis says, once she’s won, “you could join us.”

Jess gags on her whiskey. “You and Asshat?”

Lewis actually _giggles._ It’s really fucking weird. “No, I think—I think you and he might kill each other. No, I meant like—some of my friends are coming to meet me in about ten minutes. You could drink with us, if you wanted.”

Something twitches underneath her shoulder blades, some kind of awful tense knot that makes her think of high school and all the bullshit that came with it. “Not much for group events.”

“You already know Claire, you should be able to just hide in the corner and snark if you want.” Lewis wraps her hands around the cue. “It’s me, and Karen, you met her at the firm, and then Claire, and my sister. And a cop, O’Reilly. She’s bitchy like you, you’ll get along.”

“Your little birdy not coming?”

“Kate has issues with bars where your hands stick to the countertops.” Lewis smirks at her again. “For some obscure reason.”

Jessica snorts, and starts hooking the balls back into the triangle. “Her loss.”

“That’s what I said. And plus, you know, she’s not…technically legal yet. Not that Josie cares.”

She scuffs her boot over the floor. “Why are you asking?”

Lewis pulls her hair out of the ponytail, and scratches at her scalp. She shrugs. “Because honestly? Seems like you’d fit.” She considers. “If you want to invite your friend, you could. Trish. She seems nice.”

 _The last thing I need is you two getting along,_ Jessica thinks. She wets her lips. Christ, she needs to say no. She should turn around and leave, because that’s—that’d be so much easier, that’d keep _so_ much shit from coming her way, but—what the fuck is wrong with her right now. She doesn’t _want_ to say no.

“You could take a raincheck,” Lewis says. “If you wanted.”

Jessica stares hard at the wall. Her phone buzzes in her pocket again. Trish. “Not good with people,” she says, feeling like she’s peeling off her own skin. Lewis hums in the back of her throat.

“None of us are, really.”

Jessica watches Lewis through her hair. Then, abruptly, she says, “You’re buying all my drinks.”

“Because I have so much money, as I’m getting paid in pie and bananas,” says Lewis, but she’s beaming. “You calling your friend?”

She does. And the next morning she wakes up (clothed, thank you) with Trish settled in the bed behind her and her chin hooked over Jessica’s shoulder. (Which, to be completely honest? Is kind of weirdly amazing. She squashes that thought down, once or twice. It bubbles back up, and sticks in her head for weeks.)

Whatever, brain.

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 **Lilith (@theangelofmercy)** : @aliasinvestig Y’all do good work.

 **Alias Investigations (@aliasinvestig)** : @theangelofmercy Whatever. -j


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